^  tut  Wxtahvimt  « 

PRINCETON,     N.    J. 

Division . . .  .^1^.  /^r^. . .  ,  .r.. 
Section    . . .  /.sl^. .(.  1. .  .\. . . 

Sie//. Numbrr ^...L..\ 


SERMONS. 


Works  hij  II.  C.  Tkencu,  D.  D.,  Bian  of  Westminster. 

IN    UNIFORM    STYLE    WITH    THIS    VOLUME. 
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SERMONS  ON  THE  DIVINITY  OF  CHRIST 

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PUBLISHED  BY  W.  J.  WIDDLETOX,  NEW  YORK. 


SERMONS 


I'RKACHED    BEFORE 


THE  UNIVEESITY  OF  CAMBRIDGE 


EICHARD  CHENEVIX  TRENCH,  D.D. 

DEAN    OF    WESTMINSTEK 
AUTHOR   OF   "SVNONYMS  OF   THE   NEW  TESTAMENT" — "THE  STUDY  OF  W0RD3"- 
"  ENGLISH,  PAST  AND  PRESENT"— "  PROVKKBS" — "  POEMs" — "  CALDERON,''  ETC 


NEW  YORK 
W.    J.    WIDDLETON" 

8UCCES80K    TO    J.     8.     REDFIELD 

18  6  2 


CONTENTS. 


SERMON  I. 
Christ  the  Only  Begotten  of  the  Father  .    .     page  7 

SERMON  II. 
Christ  the  Lamb  of  God 35 

SERMON  III. 
Christ  the  Light  of  the  World 63 

SERMON  IV. 
Christ  the  Trde  Vine      .     .         87 

SERMON  V. 
Christ  the  Judge  of  all  Men 113 


SERMON    I. 


CHRIST  THE  ONLY  BEGOTTEN  OF  THE  FATHEiL 


SERMON   I. 

CHRIST  THE  ONLY  BEGOTTEN  OF  THE  FATHER. 

John  i.  1,  14. 

In  the  beginning  was  the  Word,  and  the  Word  was  with 

God,  and  the  Word  was  God And   the  Word  was 

made  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us  (and  we  beheld  his  glory,  the 
gloiy  as  of  the  only  begotten  of  the  Father),  full  of  grace  and 
(ruth. 

All  the  controversies  of  our  time,  whatever 
questions  are  stirring  at  any  depth  the  minds 
and  spirits  of  men,  concentrate  themselves  more 
and  more  around  the  person  of  Christ.  "  What 
think  ye  of  Christ  ?"  is  more  and  more  the  ques- 
tion, which  according  as  we  answer,  we  shall 
answer  every  other  question ;  for  it  rules  and 
determines  the  answers  to  all.     This  fact,  which 

few,  I  imaiiino,  woiiM   dirpiito,  must  not  be  re- 
V 


10  SERMON  I. 

garded  as  one  auguring  ill  for  the  present  con- 
dition of  that  long  conflict  of  faith  with  unbelief, 
which  in  one  shape  or  another  runs  throughout 
all  ages,  and  lies  at  the  root  of  so  many  subor- 
dinate conflicts  which  at  first  sight  appear  to  be 
remote  from  it.  It  is  not  as  though,  after  all 
the  outworks  had  fallen,  after  these  had  one  by- 
one  been  assailed  and  taken,  the  defenders  of 
some  beleaguered  town  were  yet  defending  the 
citadel  to  the  last,  knowing  that  its  loss  would 
be  the  loss  of  all,  that  after  it,  nothing  more  re- 
mained to  defend.  It  is  rather  as  when,  after 
the  tide  of  battle  has  long  been  swaying  uncer- 
tainly hither  and  thither,  the  insight  of  the  cap- 
tains on  either  side,  or  the  very  instincts  of  the 
combatants  themselves,  have  led  them  to  per- 
ceive the  point  where  victory  is  to  be  seized,  or 
defeat  to  be  averted ;  the  true  key  of  the  posi- 
tion contended  for ;  that  which,  as  it  is  won, 
everything  will  be  won,  no  petty  losses  else- 
where affecting  this  result ;  that  which,  as  it  is 
lost,  everything  will  be  lost,  no  slight  successes 
in  any  other  quarter  at  all  availing  to  redress 


CHRIST  THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  11 

the  balance,  or  give  back  the  victory  w^hich  has 
been  lost. 

I  have,  then — not  indeed  in  any  presumptuous 
hope  to  add  aught  here  to  what  others  have 
already  spoken,  yet  still  under  the  influence  of 
these  convictions  —  chosen  for  my  argument 
during  the  month  that  I  shall  address  you  from 
this  place,  subjects  which  all  directly  treat  of 
the  person  and  dignities  of  our  Lord ;  which 
treat  of  what  he  claims,  or  what  Scripture 
claims  for  him,  to  be.  Without  pretending  to 
any  very  strict  order  of  sequence  or  coherence, 
they  yet  will  not  be  wholly  without  this.  They 
will  all  grow  out  of  that  central  dignity.  Word 
of  God,  Only  begotten  of  the  Father,  which  is 
about  to  occupy  us  this  day ;  and,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  this  day's  discourse,  they  will  all  be 
suggested  by  the  services  of  the  Sundays  on 
which  they  are  delivered.  As  to-day  we  have  to 
do  with  the  witness  of  John  the  Evangelist  to  his 
Lord,  so,  next  Sunday,  I  propose,  God  willing, 
to  deal  with  the  witness  of  the  other  John  to 
Jesus,  "  Behold  the  Lamb  of  God,  which  taketh 


12  SERMON    I. 

away  the  sin  of  the  world;"  and  then,  in  my 
remaining  discourses,  with  the  Lord's  witness, 
under  three  aspects,  to  himself:  as  the  Light 
of  the  world,  as  the  True  Vine,  and,  lastly,  on 
Advent  Sunday,  as  the  Judge  of  all  men,  to 
whom  all  judgment  is  committed,  because  he  is 
the  Son  of  Man.  May  he  of  his  own  grace,  give 
a  mouth  and  wisdom  to  speak  only  right  things 
of  him. 

By  a  course  not  altogether  unusual,  I  have, 
omitting  the  intermediate  verses,  connected  the 
first  verse  of  the  Gospel  of  St.  John  with  the 
fourteenth,  making  these  to  serve  for  my  text ; 
and  I  have  done  this  not  without  special  reason. 
For  how  often  the  Gospel  of  St.  John  practically 
begins  for  us  at  this  fourteenth  verse,  "  The 
Word  was  made  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us,  full 
of  grace  and  truth,"  or  a  verse  or  two  earlier, 
at  the  very  earliest.  All  that  goes. before,  as  we 
freely  admit,  must  have  its  purpose  and  value, 
since  God  has  been  pleased  to  reveal  it ;  but 
still  for  us  we  feel  its  chief  value  to  be  that 
with  it  we  can  stop  the  moutlis  of  Unitarians, 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY  BEGOTTEN.  13 

or  of  those,  rather,  who  call  themselves  such ; 
that  it  proves  one  of  the  most  available  weapons 
of  controversy  for  the  refutation  of  their  errors, 
and  all  those  other  errors,  Arian  and  the  like, 
which  in  the  end  inevitably  flow  into  theirs. 
These  are  the  chief  purposes  which  that  sublime 
prologue  to  the  fourth  Gospel,  that  fitting  vesti- 
bule to  this  augustest  temple,  that  portion  of 
Scripture  which  more  than  any  other  stirred  the 
marvel  and  admiration  of  the  philosophical 
heathen,  and  drew  one  and  another  within  the 
charmed  circle  of  Christian  truth,  very  often 
seems  to  us  as  though  it  were  intended  to  serve. 
It  invites  us  to  no  earnest  meditation ;  we  do 
not  seek  to  lose  ourselves  in  its  wondrous  depths, 
that  we  may  find  ourselves  again  at  heights  of 
which  we  dreamed  not  before  ;  we  make  little  or 
no  attempt  to  place  the  loftier  speculation  of  our 
own  day  in  relation  and  subordination  to  it. 
The  Incarnation  is  for  us  the  beginning  of  the 
history  of  Christ — his  Sonship  itself  practically, 
I  do  not  say  theoretically,  beo;inning  for  us  from 
that  date.     We  should  reject,  perhaps  with  some- 


14  SERMON   I. 

thing  of  indignation,  any  such  statement,  if  it 
were  put  boldly  before  us.  And  yet  how  often 
Christ  is  regarded  as  the  Word  of  God,  because 
he  then,  in  the  days  of  his  flesh,  uttered  his 
Father's  word  to  the  children  of  men ;  the  Wis- 
dom of  God,  because  of  the  wisdom  manifested 
in  the  carrying  out  of  our  redemption ;  the 
Image  of  God,  because  he  that  hath  seen  him 
hath  seen  the  Father. 

We  have  not,  indeed,  in  the  least  denied  that 
he  was  Son,  and  Word,  and  Wisdom,  and  Image, 
by  an  earlier  right,  by  one  which  is  out  of,  and 
removed  from,  all  conditions  of  time.  The  fact, 
as  revealed,  we  dutifully  accept.  But  still  we 
do  not  perceive  how  this  glory  of  Christ  which 
he  had  with  the  Father  before  all  worlds,  very 
closely  concerns  us  or  our  salvation.  It  gradu- 
ally falls  farther  and  farther  back  in  our  minds  ; 
our  lively  interest  in  theology  only  commencing 
with  the  Word  made  flesh,  as  though  then  first 
man's  close  connection  with  God  began ;  where- 
as, indeed,  it  dates  from  the  creation,  or  rather 
from   the   divine  purpose  of  the  creation — the 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  15 

lucarnation  being  not  the  cause  and  root  out  of 
which  that  connection  springs,  but  rather  itself 
the  result  and  consequence  thereof,  the  crowning 
flower  into  which  in  due  time  that  relation  un- 
folded itself.  Nay,  sometimes  even  the  Incarna- 
tion itself  is  felt  as  a  step  too  early,  and  it  is 
the  Atonement  which  first  greatly  occupies  our 
thoughts,  or  deeply  stirs  our  afiections. 

Let  us  beware,  brethren,  lest  we  allow  selfish- 
ness to  intrude  into  a  region  where  least  of  all  it 
should  find  place,  but  which  yet  too  easily  may 
become  its  especial  haunt  and  home ;  so  that  we 
shall  measure  the  value  of  truths,  not  by  the 
utterance  which  they  contain  of  God's  attributes, 
his  wisdom,  his  love,  his  righteousness,  his  truth, 
not  by  the  glory  which  they  bring  to  him,  but 
solely  by  the  bearing  which  they  seem  to  have 
on  ourselves,  and  on  our  own  individual  spiritual 
life.  Something  of  this  kind  may  perhaps  be 
traced  among  us  now  ;  when  the  truths  for  which 
Augustine  struggled,  the  doctrines  of  grace,  are 
still  precious  and  dear  to  us,  because  they  seem 
to  bfnr,  and  do  bear,  on  our  ovory-dny  life,  on 


16  SERMON   I. 

our  daily  conflict  with  siu  and  temptation  ;  while 
those  other  truths  of  the  eternal  relation  of  the 
Son  to  the  Father,  for  which  Athanasius  strove, 
for  which  he  was  contented  to  be  an  exile  and  a 
fugitive,  a  dweller  in  caves  and  in  wildernesses, 
to  brave  the  extremest  wrath  of  the  world's 
mightiest  potentate — these,  with  others  Avhich 
like  them  seem  to  lie  remote  from  our  own  im- 
mediate need,  awaken  no  lively  sympathy  in  our 
hearts.  We  confess  their  importance ;  we  should 
strive,  it  may  be  most  earnestly,  against  those 
who  should  deliberately  seek  to  rob  us  of  them ; 
we  should  probably  then  understand  that  they 
were  the  strong  substructures  which,  however 
out  of  sight,  did  yet  support  the  fabric  of  our 
faith,  that  would  be  weak  and  tottering  without 
them ;  but  they  are  not  now  in  any  sense  dear 
and  near  to  us,  like  those  doctrines  of  grace,  for 
which  Augustine  witnessed,  or  of  justification, 
from  which  Luther  shook  the  dust  of  ages  three 
centuries  ago.  Yet  surely  it  was  not  for  noth- 
ing that  in  the  early  Church  the  word  "  the- 
ology," with  more  s])ecial  reference  to  its  dcri- 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  17 

ration,  was  restricted  to  that  portion  of  what  we 
should  call  theology,  which  had  to  do  with  God 
himself,  with  the  ever-blessed  Trinity,  or  with 
the  Son  in  his  divine  nature ;  while  by  other 
words,  as  for  instance  the  "  economy,"  men  were 
used  to  designate  the  appearance  of  the  Son  of 
God  in  time,  his  life  and  walk  in  the  flesh,  his 
directly  redemptive  work.  Those  who  employed 
^  this  language  did  feel,  and  rightly,  that  in  God 
the  root  of  all  theology  lay ;  that  he  was  the 
subject-matter  of  it,  and  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously they  expressed  this  conviction  by  the 
limitation  which  they  assigned  to  the  word. 

And  the  dangers  which  beset  us  when  we  at 
all  forget  this,  are  indeed  neither  few  nor  insig- 
nificant. Theology,  when  it  limits  itself  to  the 
immediately  practical  and  useful,  dismissing 
everything  which  it  does  not  esteem  such,  will 
not  long  retain  even  that  practical  and  useful  to 
which  it  has  been  willing  to  sacrifice  everything 
besides.  Its  pastures  will  lose  their  greenness 
soon,  its  lower  levels  will  become  dry  and 
parched  and  barren,  if  they  be  not  fed  and  re- 


18  SERMON    I. 

freshed  from  the  upper  springs.  Its  conversation 
must  be  habitually  in  heaven,  if  it  shall  really 
have  anything  which  is  worth  the  telling  upon 
earth.  It  is  a  Jacob's  ladder,  but  angels  must 
descend  upon  it,  no  less  than  ascend.  If  there 
be  none  descending,  there  will  in  a  little  while 
be  none  to  ascend.  In  it  we  must  have  the 
story,  not  merely  of  man's  upward  striving  to 
God  ;  indeed,  not  of  this  at  all,  except  as  the 
result  of  God's  downward  looking  upon  men. 
It  is  not  the  record  of  a  religious  sentiment  in 
man,  a  pathology  of  the  human  soul  under  cer- 
tain of  its  higher  aspects,  but  a  record  of  a 
divine  revelation  from  God,  of  what  he  has  an- 
nounced to  men  of  his  own  being.  In  the  fact 
that  we  are  sometimes  forgetting  this,  that  there 
is  so  much  about  man,  and  so  little  about  God  in 
our  modern  theology,  lies  in  great  part  the  secret 
of  its  weakness ;  of  the  feeble  hold  which  it  has 
upon  numbers  who  would  gladly  learn  what  God 
has  declared  of  himself;  but  who  care  much  less 
for  any  secondary  notices  as  to  the  exact  manner 
in  which  this  message  has  affected  others ;  and 


CHRIST  THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  19 

least  of  all  for  what  others  have  thouglit  and 
speculated  about  him. 

If  wc  would  be  delivered  from  these  dangers, 
and  re-assert  for  that  which  is  the  queen-science 
of  all,  her  rightful  dominion  over  the  hearts  and 
spirits  of  men,  we  must  learn  to  fall  back  more 
on  those  transcendent  truths  of  which  the  pro- 
logue of  St.  John  is  full — to  meditate  on  them 
more  fully  and  more  frequently — to  bring  them 
into  greater  prominence  for  ourselves  and  for 
others — to  believe  that  it  was  not  for  nothing 
that  this  Scripture,  or  the  first  chapter  of  Colossi- 
ans,  was  written.  We  must  learn  to  connect  our 
Lord's  manifestation  in  the  flesh,  not  indeed  less 
with  all  which  followed  it,  his  death,  his  resur- 
rection, his  ascension,  his  glorified  sitting  at  the 
right  hand  of  the  Majesty  on  high ;  but  to  con- 
nect it  more  with  that  which  preceded,  his  eter- 
nal generation,  the  glory  which  he  had  with  the 
Father  before  the  world  was,  the  creation  of  all 
worlds  by  him,  and  above  all,  of  man,  not  mere- 
ly by  him,  but  in  him,  and  for  him,  and  to  him  ; 
and  this  so  really,  that  even  had  there  been  no 


20  SERMON   I. 

Fall,  an  Incarnation,  a  coming  forth  on  his  part, 
as  at  once  the  root  and  perfect  flower  of  our 
nature,  would  probably  not  the  less  have  been. 

It  behoves  us,  indeed,  to  speak  with  hesitation 
and  modesty  on  a  matter  like  this.  Had  there 
been  no  Fall,  the  conditions  under  which  that 
transcendent  manifestation  of  love  and  of  honor 
done  to  man  must  have  taken  place,  would  of 
course  have  been  infinitely  different  from  those 
under  which  the  Eternal  Sou  did  actually  ex- 
change the  form  of  God  for  the  form  of  a  ser- 
vant, and  become  obedient  unto  death,  even  the 
death  of  the  cross.  Those  conditions,  more  glo- 
rious seemingly,  would  have  been  less  glorious 
in  reality,  for  they  would  have  lacked  the  glory 
of  suffering,  the  unfathomable  wonder  of  that  in- 
finite self-denial  which  stooped  to  the  fallen  and 
the  guilty,  and  shared  the  miseries  of  the  one 
and  the  penalties  of  the  other.  But  the  thing 
itself,  we  may  reverently  believe,  would  not  the 
less  have  been.  They  only  re-affirm  what  has 
been  the  conviction  of  many  theologians  in  all 
times,  who  are  persuaded  that  the  headship  of 


CHRIST   THE    ONLY    BEGOTTEN.  21 

the  race  of  man  would  have  pertained  to  him  not 
the  less,  to  whom  all  headship  of  men  or  of  an- 
gels rightly  appertains  ;  all  things  in  heaven  and 
in  earth  being  recapitulated  in  him ;  since  only 
in  this  recapitulation  could  the  race  of  Adam  , 
have  attained  the  end  of  its  creation,  the  place 
among  the  families  of  God,  for  which  from  the 
first  it  was  designed. 

In  this  view,  the  taking  on  Himself  of  our 
flesh  by  the  Eternal  Word  was  no  makeshift,  to 
meet  a  mighty,  yet  still  a  particular  emergent, 
need ;  a  need  which,  conceding  the  liberty  of 
man's  will  and  that  it  was  possible  for  him  to 
have  continued  in  his  first  state  of  obedience, 
might  never  have  occurred.  It  was  not  a  mere 
result  and  reparation  of  the  Fall,  such  an  act  as, 
except  for  that,  would  never  have  been  ;  but  lay 
bedded  at  a  far  deeper  depth  in  the  counsels  of 
God  for  the  glory  of  his  Son,  and  the  exaltation 
of  that  race  formed  in  liis  image  and  his  likeness. 
For  against  those  who  regard  the  Incarnation  as 
an  arbitrary,  or  as  merely  an  historic  event,  and 
not  an  ideal  one  as  well,  we  may  well  urge  this 


22  SERMON   I. 

weighty  consideration,  that  the  Son  of  God  did 
not  in  and  after  his  ascension  strip  off  this  human 
nature  again;  he  did  not  regard  his  humanity 
as  a  robe,  to  be  worn  for  awhile,  and  then  laid 
aside ;  the  convenient  form  of  his  manifestation, 
so  long  as  he  was  conversing  with  men  upon 
earth,  but  the  fitness  of  which  had  with  that  con- 
versation passed  away.  So  far  from  this,  we 
know  on  the  contrary  that  he  assumed  our  nature 
for  ever,  married  it  to  himself,  glorified  it  with 
his  own  glory,  carried  it  as  the  form  of  his  eter- 
nal subsistence  into  the  world  of  angels,  before 
the  presence  of  his  Father.  Had  there  been  any- 
thing accidental  here,  had  the  assumption  of  our 
nature  been  an  afterthought  (I  speak  as  a  man), 
this  marriage  of  the  Son  of  God  with  that  na- 
ture could  scarcely  be  conceived.  He  could 
hardly  have  so  taken  it — taken  it,  that  is,  for 
ever — unless  it  had  possessed  an  ideal  as  well  as 
an  historic  fitness ;  unless  pre-established  har- 
monies had  existed,  such  harmonies  as  only  a 
divine  intention  could  have  brought  about  be- 
tween the  one  and  the  other. 


CHRIST  THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  23 

What  those  pre-established  harmonies  were 
the  words  of  the  heathen  poet,  but  words 
adopted  and  made  his  own  by  the  Christian 
Apostle,  declare — "  For  we  are  all  his  offspring ;" 
words,  be  it  remembered,  not  addressed  to  the 
regenerate,  and  on  the  ground  of  their  regenera- 
tion, but  addressed  by  St.  Paul  to  his  heathen 
listeners  at  Athens.  Children  of  this  world, 
children  of  wrath,  as  all  or  nearly  all  of  those 
listeners  may  well  have  been  when  he  addressed 
them,  he  yet  did  not  fear  to  bring  them  back  to 
their  divine  original,  to  remind  them  of  the  ideal 
heights  and  primeval  destinies  of  man — all  for- 
feited in  Adam,  and  now  won  back  and  recov- 
ered in  Christ ;  but  which  yet  had  been  only  re- 
co'?erable,  because  they  were  a  portion  of  man's 
original  in';3iitance ;  because  in  the  fact  that 
man  was  "Jtol'z  offspring,  or  God's  race,  the  pos- 
sibility lay  that  Inc  should  come  forth  from  God, 
he  too  God's  Son  from  eternity,  fulfilling  this 
name  to  the  uttermost ;  who  should  place  his 
shoulders  under  the  mighty  ruin  of  our  race, 
should  arrest  its  fall,  and  so  vindicate  his  right 


24  SER5I0N   I, 

to  exclaim,  "The  earth  and  its  inhabiters  are 
dissolved.     I  bear  up  the  pillars  thereof." 

It  seems  to  me,  therefore,  that  in  discoursing 
of  the  Word  made  flesh,  we  may  fitly,  as  regards 
the  redeemed,  carry  back  our  thoughts  to  that 
creation  of  man  in  God's  image  and  likeness, 
which  alone  rendered  an  Incarnation  possible. 
We  may  fitly  also,  as  respects  the  Redeemer, 
declare  that  we  regard  that  but  as  one  step,  the 
last  indeed,  and  most  glorious  one,  of  his  mani- 
festation, that  he  who  so  manifested  himself  then, 
had  been  manifesting  himself  from  the  beginning 
of  the  world ;  and  not  of  our  world  only ;  for  the 
Apostle  speaks  of  another  and  a  higher  world  in 
these  words,  "  When  he  bringeth  in  the  First 
Begotten  into  the  world  he  saith.  And  let  all  the 
angels  of  God  worship  him."  But  yet  in  our 
world  also  we  may  affirm  that  he  had  been  mani- 
festing himself  long  before,  patriarch  and  prophet 
walking  in  his  light,  encountering  him,  as  he,  the 
Angel  of  the  Covenant,  the  Captair:-.  of  the  Lord's 
Host,  preluded  his  Incarnatior  by  transient  aS' 
sumptions  of  a  human  forr  .     Tea,  every  spark 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  25 

of  higher  life  which  was  not  trodden  out  in 
heathendom,  we  have  a  right,  resting  on  this 
Scripture,  to  declare  that  it  was  he  who  kept  it 
alive,  that  this  light  shining  in  men's  darkness 
was  his  light,  his  unextinguished  and  inextin- 
guishable witness  in  the  hearts  and  consciences 
of  men. 

When,  however,  the  light  shining  in  the  dark- 
ness proved  ever  more  unable  to  scatter  it,  for 
"  the  darkness  comprehended  it  not,"  then  there 
followed  another  step  in  the  manifestation  of  the 
Eternal  Word.  He  who  was  the  divine  ground 
of  man's  being,  himself  became  man :  "  the  Word 
was  made  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us  (and  we  be- 
held his  glory,  the  glory  as  of  the  only  begotten 
of  the  Father),  full  of  grace  and  truth."—"  We 
beheld,"  exclaims  the  Apostle,  "  his  glory." 
And  what  was  the  glory  which  he  beheld  ?  The 
fullness  of  his  grace  and  truth.  Not  in  the  full- 
ness of  his  power,  not  in  the  mighty  works  which 
he  wrought,  or  which  were  wrought  on  him,  not 
in  signs  and  miracles  and  wonders,  not  in  any  of 
these  did  the  Apostle  detect  "  the  glory  as  of  the 


25  SERMON   I. 

only  begotten  of  the  Father;"  but  in  this,  tha. 
he  went  up  and  down  the  world  with  words  of 
truth,  and  gracious  deeds  of  healing ;  that  he 
preached  the  Gospel  to  the  poor,  that  he  stooped 
to  every  need,  had  a  heart  for  every  wo.  In 
these  things  shone  out  the  glory  which  the  be- 
loved disciple  saw. 

Oh,  brethren,  what  potent  medicine  is  here 
for  the  pride  and  swellings  of  our  souls !  We 
have  in  his  life  of  whom  St.  John  is  speaking 
the  human  when  it  is  most  godlike  ;  nay,  rather, 
we  have  here  man  in  his  actual  identity  with 
God.  Surely  this  must  be  man,  as  he  most 
ought  to  be ;  and  oh !  how  unlike  he  proves  to 
that  dream  of  human  greatness  which  we  some- 
times would  fain  realize  for  ourselves,  which  we 
are  ready  to  wonder  after  when  realized  in 
others.  What  a  witness  is  here  borne  against 
that  worship  of  force  —  moral  or  immoral,  it 
matters  little — to  which  some  would  so  earnest 
ly  invite  us,  which  is  only  too  welcome  to  cii 
selves ;  as  though  strength,  if  only  it  be  strong 
enough,   contained   ever   an   apology   for  itself. 


CHRIST   THE    ONLY    BEGOTTEN.  27 

justified  and  redeemed  its  own  excesses,  bcca.me 
a  law  to  itself,  and  might  own  no  other  law ; 
the  ten  commandments,  with  their  "  Love  God," 
and  "  Love  your  neighbor,"  having  been  never 
meant  for  the  leading  spirits  of  the  world  —  so 
that,  to  hear  some  speak,  we  might  suppose  that 
holiness  and  righteousness  are  only  one  of  the 
many  ways  in  which  men  are  free  to  develop 
themselves  and  their  own  inward  life ;  while  if 
their  taste  and  impulses  are  in  another  direc- 
tion, they  are  equally  free  to  choose  that  other. 
But  here  at  length  is  the  divine  idea  of  humani- 
ty ;  the  one  man,  about  whom,  if  we  believe  any- 
thing, we  must  believe  that  his  life  is  normal 
and  regulative  for  the  lives  of  all  other  men  ; 
and  that  life  how  different  from,  and  how  far 
rebuking,  those  lives  of  "  the  men  of  the  earth," 
the  proud  and  strong,  for  whom  our  admiration 
is  demanded. 

And  then,  as  another  fruit  of  the  Incarnation, 
it  not  merely  delivers  us  from  false  standard^! 
0."  glory  and  of  greatness,  giving  us  for  these 
the  true,  but,  much  more  than  this,  supplies  us 


28  SERMON   I. 

with  a  deliverance  from  the  same  disease  of  our 
spirits,  when  it  has  reached  a  far  higher  inten- 
sity. We  have  thus  a  man  whom  men  may  wor- 
ship, and  yet  not  be  guilty  of  idolatry ;  whom 
they  are  bound  to  worship,  for  he  is  also  the  Son 
of  God,  if  they  would  not  be  guilty  of  impiety. 
Herein  is  deliverance  from  the  last  and  subtlest 
form  of  all  idolatry,  the  deification  and  worship 
of  man,  and,  worst  of  all,  of  him  in  all  which 
constitutes  his  shame  no  less  than  his  glory. 
The  race  of  mankind,  growing  intellectually  to 
man's  estate,  may  outlive  and  leave  far  behind 
every  other  form  of  false  worship.  It  may  no 
longer  fill  a  profaned  pantheon  with  birds  and 
beasts  and  creeping  things.  The  beneficent 
powers  of  nature  may  no  longer  attract,  nor  the 
blind  forces  of  nature  extort,  its  homage ;  hero 
and  demigod  may  pertain  to  creeds  outworn  and 
a  long-vanished  past ;  but  there  is  an  idol-woT- 
ship  which  remains  still  behind,  and  from  which 
there  is  no  deliverance,  except  in  him  in  whoE" 
alone  is  deliverance  from  all  idolatry,  and  who 
alone   satisfies   the    yearnings   out   of  which   it 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  29 

springs.  "God  is  man,"  or  "Man  is  God"  — 
Ave  must  choose  between  these  two  statements, 
and  accept  the  tremendous  consequences  of  our 
choice.  A  time  in  the  development  of  the  his- 
tory of  our  race  arrives,  when  these  are  the  only 
alternatives  for  every  man.  And  if  we  are  wil- 
ling to  believe  St.  Paul  and  St.  John,  be  sure, 
brethren,  that  the  question  in  the  end  will  pre- 
sent itself  to  every  man  in  a  very  palpable  form, 
and  one  from  which  there  shall  be  no  escape, 
but  that  he  must  answer  it  one  way  or  the  other. 
Will  he  accept  the  God-man,  him  who  was  God 
from  everlasting  before  he  was  made  man  ;  or  in 
lieu  of  him,  a  man-god,  a  man  that  has  lifted  up 
himself,  and  been  lifted  up  by  the  consent  of  his 
fellows,  to  this  blasphemous  height  ? 

Nor  is  it  Scripture  alone  which  declares  this : 
he  must  be  blind  indeed  to  the  moral  signs  of 
the  times,  who  can  not  perceive  this  mystery  of 
iniquity,  the  last  and  the  crowning  one,  already 
working ;  this  world-wide  conspiracy,  the  same 
of  which  David  spake  in  the  second  Psalm, 
spreading    through    an    apostate    Christendom 


30  SERMON   I. 

which  is  ripening  more  and  more  for  an  open 
revolt  from  its  Lord,  "  Man  is  God,"  this  is 
the  new  Gospel,  which  is  seeking  to  supplant  the 
old,  or  "  God  is  man."  It  needs  hardly  be  ob- 
served that  this  new  gospel  is  indeed  atheism,^ 
and  that  veiled  under  thinnest  disguise.  For 
"  Man  is  God,"  what  after  all  does  it  amount  to 
but  this  —  "Man  is  man"?  for  they  who  so 
speak,  having  in  this  very  utterance  evidently 
renounced  a  belief  in  God,  in  a  Being,  that  is 
greater,  better,  holier,  wiser,  than  man,  have  no 
right  to  retain  and  juggle  with  a  name  which 
belongs  to  another  and  a  higher  range  of  things 
than  any  which  they  would  acknowledge,  to 
deck  themselves  with  its  spoils,  and  by  aid  of 
these  to  cover  and  conceal  their  own  miserable 
poverty ;  crouching,  like  some  barbarous  horde, 
beneath  the  ruins  of  temples  and  palaces  which 
they  themselves  have  destroyed. 

But  leaving  this,  which  is  but  by  the  way,  the 
time  will  assuredly  arrive  when  every  man  will 
have  to  choose  for  the  one  or  the  other.  So  was 
ii  at  the  first  founding  of  the  Church,  when  mar- 


CHRIST  THE   ONLY   BEGOTTEN.  31 

tyr  and  confessor  took  their  side,  braving  all 
and  enduring  all,  rather  than  that  they  would 
give  to  any  other  man  the  lionor  and  the  worship 
which  was  rightfully  their  Lord's.  So  shall  it 
be  once  more,  amid  fiercer  fires  and  yet  sharper 
trials,  when  the  Church  is  passing  through  the 
final  agony,  "  the  great  tribulation,"  which  shall 
precede  its  entrance  into  glory.  What  the  God- 
man  is,  in  meekness,  in  patience,  in  love,  in  holi- 
ness, this  the  history  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  abun- 
dantly declares.  Nor  are  we  left  in  total 
ignorance  of  what  the  man-god  will  prove.  We 
need  but  to  study  him  in  the  completest  mani- 
festation which  he  has  yet  assumed,  I  mean,  of 
course,  in  the  deified  emperors  of  Rome,  a  Tibe- 
rius, a  Nero,  or  a  Domitian,  and  we  may  a  little 
guess  the  moral  lineaments  which  he  will  wear. 
What  altogether  he  will  be,  it  is  reserved  for  the 
final  Antichrist,  in  his  yet  more  complete  oppo- 
sition to  all  which  is  divine,  in  the  final  apothe- 
osis of  man,  to  declare ;  when  he,  being  indeed 
incarnate  sin,  shall  "  as  God  sit  in  the  temple  of 
God,  showing  himself  that  he  is  God,"  and  be- 


32  SERMON    I. 

ing  accepted  and  worshipped  as  sucli  by  all  save 
the  little  company  (and  they  will  be  a  little  one 
then),  who  shall  recognise  in  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
the  only  begotten  of  the  Father,  and  who  in  the 
strength  of  this  confession,  "  I  believe  in  Jesus 
Christ,  the  Son  of  God,"  shall  overcome  at  last 
by  the  blood  of  the  Lamb,  issuing  triumphantly 
from  those  fires  in  which  they  shall  have  been 
purified  and  made  white  and  tried.  To  this  de- 
cision, to  this  solemn  consummation,  the  world's 
moral  history,  "  the  times  of  the  Gentiles,"  are 
travelling,  and  by  ever  faster  strides. 

But  we  must  conclude,  and  we  will  do  it  with 
one  observation  more.  The  Apostle  who  said, 
"  We  beheld  his  glory,  the  glory  as  of  the  only 
begotten  of  the  Father,"  and  who  seemed  to  lay, 
and  no  doubt  did  lay,  such  stress  on  this  be- 
holding, is  the  same  who  alone  among  the  Evan- 
gelists reports  those  words  of  his  Lord,  "  Be- 
cause thou  hast  seen  me,  Thomas,  thou  hast 
believed ;  blessed  are  they  that  have  not  seen, 
and  yet  have  believed."  This  is  the  abiding 
blessedness,  the  blessedness  which  is  equally  for 


CHRIST   THE   ONLY    BEGOTTEN.  33 

all.  With  spiritual  eyes  (and  after  all  it  was 
only  with  these  that  the  beloved  Apostle  himself 
beheld  the  glory  of  his  Lord ;  without  these  he 
might  have  seen  Aiw,  as  so  many  others  did,  yet 
never  seen  his  glory) — with  spiritual  eyes  we 
too  may  "  behold  the  glory  as  of  the  only  begot- 
ten, full  of  grace  and  truth."  Beholding  him, 
we  may  be  transformed  into  his  image  and  like- 
ness ;  worshipping  him,  we  may  be  delivered 
from  every  false  worship ;  believing  on  him,  we 
may  receive  power  to  become  all  which  "  sons 
of  God,"  that  name  which  we  have  borne  from 

our  baptisms,  involves, 

2* 


SERMON    II. 


CHRIST  THE  LAMB  OF  GOD. 


SERMON   II. 

CHRIST  THE  LAMB  OF  GOD. 

John  i.  29. 
The  next  day  John  seeth  Jesus  coming  unto  him,  and  saith, 
Behold  the  Lamb  of  God,  wjjich  taketh  away  the  sin  of  the 
world. 

It  has  been  sometimes  asked  and  debated,  to 
which  of  the  lambs  of  sacrifice,  ordained  in  the 
Old  Testament,  did  the  Baptist  here  refer ;  with 
which  did  he  liken  that  immaculate  Lamb,  who, 
being  without  spot  and  stain,  should  take  away 
GUI  spots  and  stains,  and  bear  the  collective  sin 
of  the  world.  Did  St.  John  allude  to  the  daily 
lamb  of  the  morning  and  evening  sacrifice? — or 
was  it  to  the  lamb  of  the  passover,  commemora- 
ting the  old  deliverance  from  Egypt?  —  or  was 


3.<  RKRMON    TT. 

it  to  some  other  of  the  many  lambs  which  were 
prescribed  in  the  law  of  Moses,  as  a  portion  of 
the  ritual  of  sacrifice  appointed  there?  The 
question  is  surely  a  superfluous  one.  The  refer- 
ence is  not  special,  but  comprehensive.  It  is  to 
none  of  these  in  particular,  being  indeed  to  them 
all.  They  severally  set  forth  in  type  and  in  fig- 
ure some  part  of  that  which  He  fulfilled  in  sub- 
stance and  in  full ;  in  him,  not  now  a  lamb  of 
men,  but  the  Lamb  of  God,  being  at  length  ful- 
filled to  the  uttei'most  the  significant  word  of 
Abraham,  "  God  will  provide  himself  a  lamb." 

The  disciples  of  John  understand  the  intention 
with  which  he  thus  desig'  n/'d  Jesus  unto  them ; 
they  understand  it,  if  noj  dii  the  first  designa- 
tion, yet  at  the  second  ;  and  as  the  Evangelist 
tells  us  (he  probably  was  himself  one  of  tlie  two 
disciples,  Andrew  being  the  other),  they  "  heard 
him  speak,  and  they  followed  Jesus."  They 
quitted  one  master,  and  joined  themselves  to  an- 
other. There  was  a  drawing,  attractive  power 
in  that  word  about  the  Lamb,  the  taker  away 
of  the  world's   sin,  which    no   other  word    pos- 


CHRIST   THE    LAMB    OK   (JOI).  89 

sessed  or  could  possess.  At  a  later  day,  Clirist 
himself  declared,  "  I,  if  I  be  lifted  up,  will  draw- 
all  men  unto  me."  Already  this  potent  draw- 
ing had  begun.  Set  between  two  magnets,  the 
disciples  showed  at  once  which  was  the  mightier 
of  the  two.  John  indeed  had  met  many  needs 
of  men's  spirits — their  need  of  repentance,  of 
confession  of  sin,  of  amendment  of  life ;  but 
there  were  other  needs  which  he  could  not  meet. 
The  spirit  of  man  cries  out  for  something  deeper 
even  than  these,  something  which  shall  reach 
farther  back ;  which  shall  not  be  clogged  with 
sinful  infirmities,  as  his  own  repentance  even  at 
the  very  best  must  be.  Men  cry  for  some  work 
to  rest  upon,  which  shall  not  be  their  work,  and 
thus  underlying  the  weaknesses  of  everything 
human,  but  which  shall  be  God's ;  perfect,  com- 
plete, to  which  nothing  need  be  added,  from 
which  nothing  can  be  taken  away.  They  feel 
that  behind  and  beyond  their  repentance,  even 
though  that  repentance  be  wrought  by  the  Spirit 
of  God,  there  must  be  something  which  God  has 
not  so  much  wrought  in  them,  as  for  them ;  and 


40  SERMON    11. 

that  on  this  they  must  rest,  if  they  are  to  find 
abiding  peaee  for  the  soul ;  a  rock  to  flee  to, 
which  is  higher  than  they ;  higher  than  their  re- 
pentance, than  their  faith,  than  their  obedience, 
even  than  their  new  life  in  the  Spirit.  Now  this 
Rock  is  Christ ;  and  John  pointed  to  this  Rock, 
and  the  two  at  once  understood  him.  They  had 
longed  after  amendment  of  life,  and  John  had 
helped  them  thus  far ;  but  they  yearned  for  more 
than  this,  for  atonement,  propitiation,  ransom,  a 
conscience  purged  from  dead  works  by  the  blood 
of  sprinkling,  and  John  could  not  help  them 
here ;  except  indeed  by  directing  them  to  Jesus, 
as  in  these  memorable  words  he  did,  "  Behold 
the  Lamb  of  God,  which  taketh  away  the  sin  of 
the  world." 

It  is  impossible  to  estimate  too  highly  the  sig- 
nificance of  these  words,  or  the  place  which,  in 
a  true  scheme  of  Christian  doctrine,  they  must 
assume.  As  the  Church  understands  them,  they 
set  forth  our  Lord  in  his  central  function  and 
office,  as  the  one  perfect  sacrifice,  "  the  Lamb  of 
God ;"  they  set  forth  the  effectual  operation  of 


CHRIST  THE  LAMB   OP  GOD.  41 

liis  sacrifice  of  himself,  as  a  bearing,  and  a  bear- 
ing away,  of  the  world's  sin.  They  may  there- 
fore fitly  constitute  our  starting-point  from  which 
to  consider  what  the  Church's  doctrine  of  the 
atonement,  or  of  the  sacrifice  of  tho  dcat.i  of 
Christ,  and  of  the  consequences  which  follow 
thereupon,  may  be ;  and  this,  with  especial  refer- 
ence to  objections  brought  against  this  doctrine, 
as  failing  to  commend  itself  to  the  conscier.ce,  as 
indeed  outraging  that  sense  of  right,  that  revela- 
tion anterior  to  all  other  revelations,  ^^hicli  God 
has  planted  in  the  heart ;  as  a  doctrine  there- 
fore, which,  however  it  may  seem  to  be  in  Scrip- 
ture, however  a  superficial  interpretation  of  cer- 
tain passages  may  favor  this  impression,  it  is 
impossible  can  be  truly  there. 

The  gravity  of  the  matter  thus  brought  to 
issue  none  can  deny,  nor  yet  the  very  serious 
and  far-reaching  consequences  which  must  fol- 
low, if,  while  the  word  "  sacrifice"  should  in- 
deed be  left  us,  all  wherein  the  essence  of 
sacrifice  consisted,  as  mainly  its  vicarious  and 
satisfactory  character,  were  to  be  exploded  from 


42  SERMON    U. 

the  New  Testament.  One  of  the  first  of  these 
consequences  would  be  a  loosening,  that  I  say- 
not  a  dissolution,  of  the  bonds  between  the  Old 
Testament  and  the  New.  There  can  be  no  ques- 
tion that  in  the  Old,  the  doctrine  of  sacrifice,  of 
the  vicarious  suffering  of  one  for  another,  of  sat- 
isfaction resulting  thereupon,  everywhere  jire- 
vails.  If  there  is  nothing  of  this  in  the  New,  if 
this  is  Jewish  only  and  not  Christian  as  well,  if 
Christ,  for  instance,  is  only  the  Lamb  of  God 
because  of  his  innocence  and  purity,  and  not  be- 
cause of  his  sacrificial  death,  if  he  takes  away 
^he  sin  of  the  world  only  in  the  way  of  summon- 
nig  and  enabling  men  to  leave  off  their  sins,  all 
bonds  between  the  New  Testament  and  at  least 
the  Levitical  sacrifices  of  the  Old  are  broken. 
These  last  point  to  nothing.  They  are  a  huge 
husk  without  a  kernel ;  types  without  their  ante- 
type  ;  shadows,  but  not  "  shadows  of  the  true," 
and  thus  with  no  substance  following ;  a  promise 
without  performance ;  an  elaborate  and  enor- 
mous machinery  for  the  effecting  of  nothing. 
That  which  hitherto  has  ennobled  those  sacri- 


CHRIST   THE   LAMU    OF   GOD.  43 

fices  ill  our  eyes,  was  the  truth  which  they  fore- 
showed. Let  them  have  foreshowed  nothiug  of 
the  kind,  and  they  sink  down  at  once  to  a  level 
with  the  heathen  sacrifice? ;  nay,  not  merely  to 
a  level  with  those,  as  those  have  hitherto  been 
regarded  by  us,  but  they  drag  down  to  a  far 
lower  depth  the  heathen  and  themselves  to- 
gether. Hitherto  the  heathen  sacrifices,  hideous 
distortions  of  the  true  as  they  so  often  were,  yet 
were  not  without  a  certain  terrible  grandeur  of 
their  own.  A  ray  of  the  glory  of  Calvary  fell 
upon  them,  and,  dark  as  they  remained,  yet  did 
not  leave  them  all  dark.  They  were  blind  feel- 
ings after  the  cross  of  Christ,  passionate  outcries 
for  it ;  they  were  lies  indeed,  yet  lies  which 
cried  after  the  truth.  But  take  from  Christ's 
cross  its  character  of  an  altar,  and  from  his 
death  its  character  of  a  sacrifice,  and  at  once  tlic 
Levitical  sacrifices  no  longer  remain  as  shadows 
of  the  true,  and  the  heathen  cease  to  be  remote 
resemblances  of  the  same.  Let  the  doctrine  of 
Christ's  death  as  being  a  vicarious  atonement 
and  satisfaction  be  dismissed  ficm  the  New  Tcs- 


44  SERMON   II. 

tament,  on  the  ground  of  its  contradiction  to  tho 
righteous  moral  instincts  of  humanity,  and  it  is 
impossible  consistently  to  maintain  the  divine 
character  of  large  portions  of  the  Old. 

But  let  us  a  little  consider  what  the  objections 
are,  which  are  now  being  made  to  the  Church's 
doctrine  of  the  atonement,  and  what  the  answers 
which  they  seem  to  demand.  And  first  in  regard 
to  this  discussion  it  may  be  generally  observed, 
that  it  is  not  sufficient  to  reply  to  these  objec- 
tions out  of  Scripture ;  the  very  argument  of  the 
objectors  being,  that  the  meaning  we  attach  to 
our  Scripture  proofs  can  not  be  the  right  one,  re- 
volting, as  it  does,  that  sense  of  righteousness 
and  justice  which  is  God's  gift  to  men  anterior 
to  all  other  gifts,  that  earliest  revelation  of  him- 
self which  no  later  one  can  ever  gainsay  or  set 
aside,  but  into  harmony  with  which  each  later 
must  be  brought.  We  must  seek  our  arguments 
elsewhere.  We  must  endeavor  first  to  show, 
and,  confined  within  the  narrow  bounds  of  a  sin- 
gle discourse,  I  shall  limit  myself  to  this — how 
that  truth  which  we  affirm,  does  not  offend,  but 


CHRIST   THE   LAMB    OF   GOD.  45 

indeed  commends  itself  to,  the  moral  sense ;  by 
manifestation  of  the  truth  commending  ourselves 
and  it  to  the  consciences  of  men. 

The  objection,  then,  as  I  take  it,  to  Christ's 
vicarious  offering — for  I  will  first  deal  with  this 
—  to  the  assertion  that  he  died  not  merely  for 
the  good  of.  but  in  the  room  and  in  the  stead  of, 
others,  tasted  death  for  them,  commonly  assumes 
this  form.  Must  not  righteousness,  it  is  said,  be 
tlie  law  of  all  God's  dealings  ?  Most  of  all,  must 
we  not  expect  to  find  consistent  with  highest 
righteousness  that  which  is  the  most  solemn  and 
awful  dealing  of  God  with  liis  creatures  ?  But 
how  is  it  agreeable  with  this,  how  can  it  be 
called  just,  nay,  how  can  it  be  acquitted  of  ex- 
tremest  injustice,  to  lay  on  one  man  the  penalties 
of  others,  so  that  he  pays  the  things  which  he 
never  took,  so  that  they  sin  and  he  is  punished, 
on  him  being  laid  the  iniquities  of  them  all  ? 
What  have  we  here,  an  adversary  will  insist, 
but  in  the  awfullest  sphere  of  all,  and  in  matters 
the  most  tremendous,  the  same  injustice  which, 
even  in  least  things,  provokes  our  indignation ; 


46  SERMON   II. 

as,  for  instance,  when  some  playfellow  of  a 
yountr  prince  is  constituted,  as  we  may  some- 
times have  read  of,  to  suffer  the  consequences 
of  his  idleness;  so  that  one  neglects  his  tasks, 
and  another  is  chastised ;  one  plays  the  truant, 
and  another  bears  the  smart  ? 

But  the  case  is  not  in  point ;  and,  since  it  has 
been  started,  it  might  be  worth  our  while  to 
make  it  in  point,  and  then  to  consider  whether 
it  presents  itself  in  any  aspect  so  monstrous  and 
absurd.  To  make  it  in  point,  the  parts  which 
the  several  persons  sustain  must,  in  the  first 
place,  be  reversed.  It  must  be  that  the  young 
prince  suffers  for  his  humbler  truant  companions, 
not  one  of  them  for  him ;  it  must  be  that  he  does 
it,  not  of  compulsion  or  constraint,  but  of  his  own 
free  will ;  it  must  be  that  only  such  an  act  as 
tills  would  overcome  their  perversity  and  idle- 
ness ;  that  he  offers  himself  to  this  correction, 
knowing  tliat  nothing  else  would  overcome  it, 
and  that  this  would  be  effectual  to  do  so.  A 
submission  with  this  knowledge  to  the  punish- 
ment of  their  faults  and  negligences  and  short- 


CHRIST  THE   LAMB   OP   GOD.  47 

comings  might  be  strange,  even  as  all  acts  of 
condescending  self-offering  love  are  strange  in  a 
world  of  selfishness  and  pride ;  but  surely  there 
would  be  nothing  in  it  either  monstrous  or  ridic- 
ulous. 

And  exactly  in  the  same  way,  when  we  hear 
it  urged,  How  can  it  be  righteous  to  lay  on 
one  man  the  penalties  of  others  ?  surely  we 
must  feel  that  the  question,  to  be  effectually 
answered,  needs  only  to  be  more  accurately 
put ;  that  the  form  which  it  ought  to  assume  is 
this.  How  can  it  be  righteous  for  one  man  to 
take  upon  himself  the  penalties  of  others  ?  and 
none  who  remember  the  "  Lo !  I  come"  of  the 
Saviour,  the  willing  sacrifice  of  our  Issac,  pre- 
figured by  his  who  climbed  so  meekly  in  his 
father's  company  the  hill  of  Moriah — none,  I 
say,  who  remember  this,  will  deny  our  right  to 
make  this  change  ;  while  surely  the  whole  aspect 
of  the  question  is  now  by  this  little  change  al- 
tered altogether.  For  how  many  an  act  of 
heroic  self-sacrifice,  which  it  would  be  most  un- 
righteous for  others  to  demand  from,  or  to  force 


48  SERMON   II. 

on,  one  reluctant,  whicli  indeed  would  cease  to 
be  heroism  or  sacrifice  at  all,  unless  wholly  self- 
imposed,  is  yet  most  glorious  when  one  has  free- 
ly offered  himself  thereunto ;  is  only  not  right- 
eous, because  it  is  so  much  better  than  righteous, 
because  it  moves  in  that  higher  region  where  law 
is  no  more  known,  but  only  known  no  more  be- 
cause it  has  been  transfigured  into  love.  "Where- 
in else  is  the  chief  glory  of  history  but  in  those 
deeds  of  self-devotion,  of  heroic  self-offering, 
which,  like  trumpet-tones  sovmding  from  the 
depths  of  the  past,  rouse  us,  at  least  for  a  while, 
from  the  selfish  dream  of  life  to  a  nobler  exist- 
ence ;  and  of  which  if  the  mention  has  become 
trite  and  common  now,  it  has  only  become  so 
because  the  grandeur  of  them  has  caused  them 
to  be  evermore  in  the  hearts  and  on  the  lips  of 
men.  Vicarious  suffering,  it  is  strange  to  hear 
the  mighty  uproar  which  is  made  about  it ;  when 
indeed  in  lower  forms  —  not  low  in  themselves, 
though  low  as  compared  with  the  highest  —  it  is 
everywhere,  where  love  is  at  all.  For  indeed  is 
not  this,  one  freely  taking  on  himself  the  conse- 


CHRIST   THE   LAMB   OF   GOD.  49 

quences  of  other's  faults,  and  thus  averting  from 
those  others  at  least  in  part  the  penalties  of  the 
same,  building  what  others  have  thrown  down, 
gathering  what  others  have  scattered  ':jiring 
the  burdens  which  others  have  wraoped  to- 
gether, healing  the  wounds  which  others  have 
inflicted,  paying  the  things  which  be  never  took, 
smarting  for  sins  which  he  never  ^omaitted ;  is 
not  this,  I  say,  the  law  and  the  condition  of  all 
highest  nobleness  in  the  world? — is  it  not  that 
which  God  is  continually  demanding  of  his  elect, 
they  approving  themselves  his  elect,  as  they  do 
not  shrink  from  this  demand,  as  they  freely  own 
themselves  the  debtors  of  love  to  the  last  penny 
of  the  requirements  which  it  makes  ?  And  if 
these  things  are  so,  shall  we  question  the  right 
of  God  himself  to  display  this  nobleness  which 
he  demands  of  his  creatures  ?  Shall  we  wish  to 
rob  him  of  the  opportunity,  or  think  to  honor 
him  who  is  highest  love,  by  denying  him  the 
riglit,  to  display  it  ? 

But  the  sufferings  and  death  of  Christ  were 

not    merely   vicarious ;    they    were    also    satis- 
3 


50  SERMON    II. 

factory;  and  thus  atoning  or  setting  at  one, 
bringing  together  the  Holy  and  the  unholy, 
who  could  not  have  been  reconciled  in  any  other 
way.  When  we  speak  thus,  we  are  sometimes 
taunted  at  the  outset  with  the  fact  that  the  word 
"  satisfaction,"  as  applied  to  the  death  of  Christ 
and  its  results,  nowhere  occurs  in  Scripture ;  so 
belongs  to  the  later  Latin  theology  (Anselm 
being  the  first  to  employ  it),  that  the  Greek 
theology  does  not  so  much  as  possess  the  word 
— I  mean  of  course  any  Greek  equivalent  for  it. 
This  is  true ;  but  though  the  word  "  satisfac- 
tion" is  not  in  b^cripture,  the  thing  is  everywhere 
there,  and  we  are  contending  not  about  words, 
but  things ;  the  idea  of  it  is  inherent  in  ransom, 
in  redemption,  in  propitiation,  in  scriptural 
words  and  phrases  and  images  out  of  number ; 
and  just  as  in  the  Arian  controversy,  the  Church 
had  a  perfect  right  to  the  "  homo-ousiou,"  care- 
less whether  the  ivurd  were  in  Scripture  or  no, 
so  here  to  "  satisfaction,"  seeing  that  this  best 
expresses  and  sums  up  the  truth  which  in  this 
riiiiftor  she  holds. 


CHRIST   THE   LAMB    OF   HOD.  51 

But,  not  to  tarry  longer  with  this  onyjection  at 
the  threshold,  how,  it  is  further  urged,  could 
God  be  well  pleased  with  the  sufferings  of  the 
innocent  and  the  holy  ?  What  "  satisfaction," 
since  we  will  have  this  word,  could  he  find  in 
these  ?  Here,  as  so  often,  the  faith  of  the 
Church  is  first  caricatured,  that  so  it  may  be 
more  easily  brought  into  question.  Could  God 
have  pleasure  in  the  sufferings  of  the  innocent 
and  the  holy,  and  that  innocent  and  holy  his 
own  Son  ?  Assuredly  not ;  but  he  could  have 
pleasure,  nay,  according  to  the  moral  necessities 
of  his  own  being,  he  must  have  pleasure,  yea, 
the  highest  joy,  satisfaction,  and  delight,  in  the 
love,  the  patience,  the  obedience,  which  those 
sufferings  gave  him  the  opportunity  of  display- 
ing, which  but  for  those  he  could  r.ever  have  dis- 
played ;  above  all  he  must  ixave  rejoiced  in  these 
as  manifested  in  his  own  Son  For  even  we  our- 
selves, when  we  read  n  story  of  those  who  for 
the  love  of  their  fellows  have  made  their  lives 
one  long  patient  martyrdom,  or  who,  witnessing 
for  the  truth,  have  been  })orne  from  earth  in  the 


52  SERMON   II. 

fire-chariot  of  some  shorter  but  sharper  agony, 
do  we  not  feel  that  we  have  a  right  to  rejoice  in 
these  martyrs  of  truth  and  love,  yea,  in  the  very 
pains  and  sulTerings  which  they  endured  ?  that 
only  as  the  nerves  of  our  own  moral  being  are 
weak  and  unstrung,  only  as  we  have  become  in- 
capable not  merely  of  doing,  but  even  of  appre- 
ciating, what  is  noble  and  great,  do  we  grudge 
them  those  pains,  do  we  wish  for  them  one  of 
these  to  have  been  less ;  seeing  that  these  were 
the  conditions  of  their  greatness,  that  without 
which  it  could  never  have  been  shown,  without 
which  it  might  never  have  existed  ? 

Even  the  heathen  moralist  could  say  of  God 
in  his  dealings  with  good  men,  ^'•fortiter  amat ;" 
there  is  no  weakness  in  his  love ;  it  is  love  ac- 
cording to  which  he  does  not  spare  his  own,  but 
thrusts  them  for*.h  ^.o  labor  and  difficulty  and 
pains,  in  which  alone  they  can  be  perfected ; 
even  as  the  same  heathe  3culd  affirm  that  God 
had  joy  in  nobly  sufferir.f,  men ;  not,  of  course, 
for  the  sufferings'  sake,  but  for  the  virtues  which 
were  manifested   therein.     And  should  not  the 


CHRIST  THE   LAMB   OP   GOD.  53 

God  and  Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  have 
pleasure  in  the  faith,  the  love,  the  obedience  of 
his  Son  ?  Yea,  it  was  a  joy  such  as  only  the 
mind  and  heart  of  God  could  contain,  that  in 
his  Son  this  perfect  pattern  of  self-forgetting, 
self-offering  love  was  displayed.  We  do  not 
shrink  from  accepting  in  the  simplest  sense  the 
assertion  of  the  Apostle,  that  Christ,  giving  him- 
self for  us  on  the  Cross,  became  therein  and 
thereby  "  a  sacrifice  of  a  sweet-smelling  savor" 
unto  God ;  that  he  was  well  pleased  therewith, 
and  said  at  length  what  he  would  never  else 
have  said,  "  I  have  found  a  ransom." 

Christ  satisfied  herein — not  the  divine  anger 
—but  the  divine  craving  and  yearning  after  a 
perfect  holiness,  righteousness,  and  obedience  in 
man,  God's  chosen  creature,  the  first-fruits  of  his 
creatures ;  which  craving  no  man  had  satisfied, 
but  all  had  disappointed,  before.  Tuere  had 
been  a  flaw  in  every  other  man's  escutcheon ; 
every  other,  instead  of  repairing  the  breach 
which  Adam  hr.u  made,  had  himself  left  that 
breach  wider   tuan   he  found   it.     But  here  at 


54  SERMON    II. 

length  was  one,  a  son  of  man,  yet  fairer  than 
all  the  children  of  men,  one  on  whom  the  fa- 
ther's love  could  rest  with  a  perfect  compla- 
cency, in  regard  of  whom  he  could  declare, 
"  This  is  my  beloved  Son,  in  whom  I  am  well 
pleased,"  in  whom  he  had  pleasure  without  stint 
and  without  drawback.  And  that  life  of  his, 
the  long  self-offering  of  that  life  of  love  was 
crowned,  consummated,  and  perfected,  by  the 
sacrifice  of  his  death,  wherein  he  satisfied  to  the 
uttermost  every  demand  which  God  could  make 
on  him,  and  satisfied  for  all  the  demands  which 
God  had  made  upon  all  the  other  children  of 
men,  and  which  they  had  not  satisfied  for  them- 
selves. 

But  if  the  question  is  here  asked,  How  could 
one  man  satisfy  for  many  ?  how  by  one  man's 
obedience  could  many  be  made  righteous  ?  the 
answer  is  not  far  to  seek.  The  transcendent 
worth  of  that  obedience  which  Christ  rendered, 
of  that  oblation  which  he  offered,  the  power 
which  it  possessed  of  countervailing  and  coun- 
terbalancing a  world's  sin,  lay  in  this,  that  ho 


CHRIST  THE  LAMB   OF   GOD.  65 

T^ho  oflfered  these,  while  he  bore  a  human  nature, 
and  wrought  human  acts,  was  a  Divine  person ; 
not  iudjcd  God  alone,  for  as  such  he  would  never 
have  been  in  the  condition  to  oifer ;  nor  man 
alone,  for  then  the  worth  of  his  offering  could 
never  have  reached  so  far ;  but  that  he  was  God 
and  man  in  one  person  indissolubly  united,  and 
in  this  person  performing  all  those  acts,  man  that 
he  might  obey  and  suffer  and  die,  God  that  he 
might  add  to  every  act  of  his  obedience,  his  suf- 
fering, his  death,  an  immeasurable  worth,  steei> 
ing  in  the  glory  of  his  divine  personality  all  of 
human  that  he  wrought.  Christ  was  able  so 
summarily  to  pay  our  debt,  because  he  had  an 
other  and  a  higher  coin  in  which  to  pay  it  than 
tiiat  in  which  it  was  contracted.  It  was  con- 
tracted in  the  currency  of  earth ;  he  paid  it  in 
the  currency  of  heaven.  Nor  was  it,  as  some 
among  the  schoolmen  of  the  Middle  Ages  taught, 
that  God  arbitrarily  ascribed  and  imputed  to 
Christ's  obedience  unto  death  a  value  which 
made  it  equal  to  the  needs  and  sins  of  the  world, 
such  a  value  as  it  would  not  have  had  but  for 


66  SERMON    II. 

this  imputation.  We  affirm  rather  with  the 
deeper  theologians  of  those  and  cf  ail  times,  who 
crave  to  deal  with  realities,  not  with  ascriptions 
and  imputations,  that  his  offering  haa  -n  itself 
this  intrinsic  value,  that  there  was  no  ascription 
to  it,  as  of  God's  mere  pleasure,  of  a  value  wliich 
it  did  not  in  itself  possess ;  for  then  the  same 
might  have  been  imputed  to  the  work  of  an  angel 
or  of  a  saint ;  the  whole  exclusive  fitness  of  the 
Son  of  God  undertaking  the  work  would  then 
pass  away ;  and  another  might  have  made  up  the 
breach  as  well  as  he.  We  affirm  rather  that 
what  the  Son  of  God  claimed  in  behalf  of  that 
race  whereof  he  had  become  the  representative 
and  the  Head,  he  claimed  as  of  right — although, 
indeed,  that  right  was  one  which  the  Father  as 
joyfully  conceded  as  the  Son  demanded.  With- 
out a  satisfaction  such  as  this  the  eternal  inter- 
ests of  that  righteousness  whereof  God  is  the  up- 
holder in  his  own  moral  universe  would  not  have 
permitted  him  to  be,  as  he  now  is,  the  passer-by 
of  transgression,  the  justifier  and  accepter  of  "^'li- 
ungodly. 


CHRIST  THE   LAMB   OF   GOD.  57 

Such,  my  brethren,  is  the  Church's  faith  in  re- 
spect of  the  atonement.  That  atonement  is  not, 
as  some  would  persuade  us,  a  one-sided  act ;  it 
U  oks  not  one  way  only,  but  two ;  having  a  face 
with  which  it  looks  toward  God,  as  well  as  one 
with  which  it  looks  toward  man.  It  is  no  mere 
reconciling  of  man  to  God,  as  though  its  object 
were  to  remove  the  distrust,  to  kill  the  enmity 
in  man's  heart,  to  persuade  him  to  throw  down 
his  arms,  and  yield  himself  the  vanquished  of 
eternal  love.  It  is  most  truly  this,  but  it  is 
much  more  than  this.  It  is  a  reconciling  not 
merely  of  man  to  God,  but  of  God  to  man ; 
whose  love  could  not  have  gone  forth  upon  the 
children  of  men  in  its  highest  forms,  in  those  of 
forgiveness,  acceptance,  renewal,  if  this  had  not 
found  place.  Think  not  then,  my  brethren,  of 
Christ  the  peace  maker,  as  though  he  came  only 
to  announce  peace ;  to  say  to  the  doubting  and 
distrustful  children  of  men,  "  Why  will  ye  re- 
main at  such  a  miserable  and  guilty  distance 
from  your  heavenly  Father,  when  his  arms  are 

stretched  out  to  receive  you,  when  he  is  only 
8* 


58  SERMON    IT. 

waiting  to  enfold  you  within  them  '"  No  doubt 
Christ  did  come  bringing  this  message,  did  pro- 
claim that  those  arms  were  open,  tnat  heavenly 
Father  waiting  to  be  gracious,  but  he  or.'.; 
brought  this  inasmuch  as  he  made  the  peace 
which  he  announced.  "  Having  made  peace 
(si^Tjvocroi/jtfa?)  by  the  blood  of  his  Cross,"  "  he 
entered  into  the  holiest  of  all,  having  obtained 
(or,  having  himself /omwc?,  si^^a/xsvoj)  eternal  re- 
demption for  us."  In  him  and  through  him, 
through  the  sacrifice  of  death,  the  disturbed,  and 
in  part  suspended  relations  between  God  and 
his  sinful  creatures,  were  reconstituted  anew; 
his  blood  being  shed  to  cleanse  men  from  their 
sins,  and  not  to  teach  them  that  those  sins  need- 
ed no  cleansing,  and  could  be  forgiven  without 
one. 

And  will  any  faith  which  is  short  of  this  faith 
satisfy  the  deepest  needs  and  cravings  of  your 
souls  ?  You  may  struggle  against  it  with  your 
understandings ;  though,  I  think,  very  needless- 
ly ;  for  it  seems  to  me  to  approve  itself  to  the 
reason  and  the  conscience,  quite  as  much  as  to 


CHRIST   THE   LAMB   OP   GOD.  59 

demand  acceptance  of  our  faith ;  but  you  will 
crave  it  with  your  inmost  spirits.  There  are 
times  when,  perhaps,  nothing  short  of  this  will 
save  you  from  a  hopeless  despair.  Let  me  im- 
agine, for  example,  one,  who  with  many  capaci- 
ties for  a  nobler  and  purer  life,  and  many  calls 
thereunto,  has  yet  suffered  himself  to  be  entan- 
gled in  youthful  lusts,  has  stained  himself  with 
these ;  and  then  after  a  while  awakens,  or  rather 
is  awakened  by  the  good  Spirit  of  God,  to  ask 
himself.  What  have  I  done  ?  How  fares  it  with 
him  at  the  retrospect  then,  when  he,  not  wholly 
laid  waste  in  spirit,  is  made  to  possess  (oh,  fear- 
ful possession  !)  the  sins  of  his  youth  ?  Like  a 
stricken  deer,  though  none  but  himself  may  be 
conscious  of  his  wound,  he  wanders  away  from 
his  fellows ;  or  if  with  them,  he  is  alone  among 
them,  for  he  is  brooding  still  and  ever  on  the 
awful  mystery  of  evil  which  he  now  too  nearly 
knows.  And  now  too  all  purity,  the  fearful  in- 
nocence of  children,  the  holy  love  of  sister  and 
of  mother,  and  the  love  which  he  had  once 
dreamed  of  as  better  even  than  these,  with  all 


60  SERMON    II. 

which  is  supremely  fair  in  nature  or  in  art, 
comes  to  him  with  a  shock  of  pa'xi^  is  fraught 
with  an  infinite  sadness  ;  for  it  wakers  up  in  him 
by  contrast  a  livelier  sense  of  what  he  is,  and 
what,  as  it  seems,  he  must  for  ever,  be  ;  it  re- 
minds him  of  a  Paradise  for  ever  lost,  the  angel 
of  God's  anger  guarding  with  a  fiery  sword  its 
entrance  against  him.  He  tries  by  a  thousand 
devices  to  still,  or  at  least  to  deaden,  the  undy- 
ing pain  of  his  spirit.  What  is  this  word  sin, 
that  it  should  torment  him  so  ?  He  will  tear 
away  the  conscience  of  it,  this  poisonous  shirt  of 
Nessus,  eating  into  his  soul,  which  in  a  heedless 
moment  he  has  put  on.  But  no ;  he  can  tear 
away  his  own  flesh,  but  he  can  not  tear  away 
that.  Go  where  he  may,  he  still  carries  with 
him  tlie  barbed  shaft  which  has  pierced  him  ; 
"  haeret  lateri  letalis  arundo."  The  arrow  whicli 
drinks  up  his  spirit,  there  is  no  sovereign  dittany 
which  will  cause  it  to  drop  from  his  side  —  none, 
that  is,  whicli  grows  on  earth;  but  there  is, 
which  grows  in  heaven,  and  in  the  Church  of 
Christ,  the  heavenly  enclosure  here.     And  you 


CHRIST   THE   LAMB   OP  GOD.  61 

too,  if  such  a  one  be  among  us,  may  find  yom* 
peace,  you  will  find  it,  when  you  learn  to  look 
by  faith  on  him,  "  the  Lamb  of  God,  that  taketh 
away  the  sin  of  the  world."  You  will  carry,  it 
may  be,  the  scars  of  those  wounds  which  you 
have  inflicted  upon  yourself  to  your  grave ;  but 
the  wounds  themselves  he  can  heal  them,  and 
heal  them  altogether.  He  can  give  you  back 
the  years  which  the  cankerworm  has  eaten,  the 
peace  which  your  sin  had  chased  away,  and,  as 
it  seemed  to  you,  for  ever.  He  can  do  so  and 
will.  "  Purge  me  with  hyssop,  and  I  shall  be 
clean,  wash  me,  and  I  shall  be  whiter  than 
rviif''''  —  this  will  be  then  your  prayer,  and  this 
your  prayer  will  be  fulfilled.  The  blood  of 
sprinkling  will  purge,  and  you  will  feel  yourself 
e'ean.  Your  sin  will  no  longer  be  yourself; 
^  n  will  be  able  to  look  at  it  as  separated  from 
j  Od,  as  ]uid  upon  another,  upon  One  so  strong 
■"ihat  he  did  but  for  a  moment  stagger  imder  the 
Weight  of  a  world's  sin,  and  then  so  bore,  that 
Gearing  h.  has  bcrne  it  away  f.r  evor. 


SERMON    III. 


CHRIST  THE  LIGHT  OF  THE  WORLD. 


SERMON   III. 

CHRIST  THE  LIGHT  OF  THE  WORLD. 

John  viii.  12. 

Then  spake  Jesus  unto  them  again,  saying,  I  am  the  Light 
of  the  world  ;  he  that  followeth  me  shall  not  walk  in  darkness, 
but  shall  have  the  light  of  life. 

An  attentive  and  thoughtful  student  of  the 
Gospel  of  St.  John  will  scarcely  have  failed  to 
observe  the  manner  in  which  almost  everything 
there  seems  to  revolve  round  certain  leading  an- 
titheses—  as  few  as  they  are  comprehensive,  as 
simple  as  they  are  sublime.  The  spirit  and  the 
flesh,  truth  and  falsehood,  life  and  death,  or,  as 
here,  light  and  darkness,  these  recur  continual- 
ly ;  the  burden  of  the  highest  and  deepest  things 
of  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  of  that  other  king- 


66  SERMON   III. 

dom  opposed  to  his  kingdom,  is  laid  upon  them  ; 
and  they  answer  all  purposes,  and  meet  every 
need.  It  is  the  very  character  of  genius  even  in 
things  earthly  and  uninspired,  that  with  simplest 
implements  and  fewest  materials  it  brings  about 
the  mightiest  and  most  marvellous  results.  Ex- 
actly so  is  it  here,  in  a  yet  higher  sphere ;  in 
that  not  of  human  genius,  but  of  di^^ne  inspira- 
tion. The  Lord  himself,  and  the  Evangelist  who 
has  learned  not  merely  to  record,  but  to  think 
and  speak  his  Lord's  language,  move  among 
these  few,  but  at  the  same  time  vast  and  compre- 
hensive contrasts,  and  by  their  aid  set  forth  to 
us  the  life  in  God,  which  is  life,  and  the  life  out 
of  God,  which  is  death ;  all  that  is  to  be  sought, 
and  all  that  is  to  be  shunned ;  they  set  forth  this 
as  no  accumulation  of  words  and  images,  no  pomp 
of  rhetoric  could  ever  have  availed  to  do  it. 

There  are  those  to  whom  the  diction  of  the 
Evangelist  in  its  extreme  simplicity,  the  lan- 
guage of  the  Lord  himself,  as  he  utters  himself 
in  this  fourth  Gospel,  will  seem  poor  at  a  first 
acquaintance  with  it ;  but  just  as  St.  Paul  de- 


CHRIST   THE   LIGHT   OF  THE   WORLD.  67 

clared  "  the  foolishness  of  God  is  wiser  than 
men,'*  so,  with  the  example  of  his  bold  utterance 
before  us,  we  also  may  be  bold  to  say,  "  the  pov- 
erty of  God  is  riclicr  than  men,"  than  all  the 
treasures  of  their  eloquence,  than  all  the  wealth 
of  their  words ;  and  never  does  a  conviction  of 
this  come  home  to  us  with  greater  force  than 
when  we  study  as  we  ought  the  Gospel  and  Epis- 
tles of  St.  John.  How  simple,  for  example,  and 
yet  how  far-reaching  the  words  before  us :  "I 
am  the  Light  of  the  world  ;  he  that  followeth  me 
^hall  not  walk  in  darkness,  but  shall  have  the 
light  of  life."  They  move  in  a  sphere  of  imagery 
the  most  obvious,  light  and  darkness  being,  so  to 
speak,  primary  moral  symbols,  symbols  respect- 
ively of  knowledge  and  of  ignorance  in  the  intel- 
lectual world,  of  good  and  evil  in  the  ethical,  I 
suppose  that  no  nation  has  ever  existed  on  the 
earth  which  has  shifted  and  reversed  the  signifi- 
cance of  these  symbols  ;  for  whom  light  has  rep- 
resented ignorance  and  evil,  r  darkness  knowl- 
edge and  good  ;  and  it  is  quite  inconceivable 
■•^^■at  such  a  reversing  of  their  significance  should 


68  SERMON   III. 

ever  suggest  itself  to  any.  The  symbolism  is  an- 
terior to,  and  independent  of,  all  agreement ;  it 
admits  of  no  discussion ;  it  is  incapable  of  any 
cliange ;  being  rooted  in  those  mysterious  corre- 
spondencies between  the  natural  and  moral  world, 
which  bear  testimony  at  once  to  their  own  inhe- 
rent and  unchangeable  fitness.  Angels  are  and 
ever  will  be  regarded  by  us  as  clothed  with  light, 
in  shining  robes ;  yea,  God  himself  will  clothe 
himself  for  all  with  light  as  with  a  garment,  will 
dwell  in  light  inaccessible,  will  be  the  light  as 
the  life  of  men ;  while  the  kingdom  of  evil  will 
be  contemplated  evermore  as  a  kingdom  of  dark- 
ness, and  evil  works  as  deeds  of  darkness ;  even 
as  an  element  in  the  glory  of  the  heavenly  Jeru- 
salem has  been  set  forth  to  us  under  these  words : 
"  There  was  no  night  there." 

But  to  consider  these  words  more  nearly,  I 
would  entreat  you  to  observe,  my  brethren,  how 
the  Lord  assumes  in  them,  as  in  so  many  other 
of  his  words,  as  indeed  more  O'  less  distinctly  in 
all  his  words,  a  central  position  in  respect  of  l.e 
whole  family  of  mankind  ;  so  that  all  men  stand 


CHRIST  THE   LIGHT   OF   THE   WORLD.  09 

ill  a  relation  to  him  in  which  they  do  not  stand 
to  one  other,  or  to  any  child  of  man  except  only 
to  himself.  He  presents  himself,  not  as  other 
meu  are,  a  point,  it  may  be  an  important  one,  but 
still  a  point,  in  the  vast  circumference  of  humani- 
ty. He  is  rather  the  centre  to  which  the  lines 
from  every  other  point  converge ;  from  which 
they  diffuse  themselves  again.  And  in  respect 
of  this,  how  difierent  is  Christ's  self-assertion, 
from  the  self-negation  of  every  other  good  and 
holy  man.  Every  other,  in  proportion  as  he  is  a 
good  man  and  true,  rejoices  to  make  himself  noth- 
ing, to  divest  himself  of  every  glory  and  of  every 
claim.  The  Baptist  was  great  (we  have  an  an- 
gel's word  for  it),  but  when  his  countrymen 
asked  liim,  "  Who  art  thou  ?  what  sayest  thou  of 
thyself?"  the  utmost  he  would  claim  was,  to  be 
"  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilderness ;"  he  was,  he 
proclaimed,  of  the  earth,  and  being  earthly,  spake 
of  the  earth,  and  seemed  to  rejoice  in  words  of 
self-disparagement. 

But  while  he  and  every  other  godly  man  thus 
abdicates  every  claim,  puts  back,  at  least  before 


70  SERMON    Til. 

God,  the  honor  which  others  would  thrust  upon 
him,  while  every  other  thus  makes  himself  noth- 
ing, Christ,  on  the  contrary,  makes  himself  every- 
thing. He  puts  himself,  1  will  not  say  into  the 
foremost  rank,  for  that  would  ill  express  the  fact, 
but  into  a  rank  quite  by  himself.  And  yet  he 
who  did  so,  was,  as  we  know,  the  meek  and  the 
lowly  one,  was  clothed  with  humility,  came  seek- 
ing not  his  own  glory,  but  the  glory  of  his  Fa- 
ther ;  while  for  all  this  no  words  are  too  large, 
no  statements  too  magnificent,  for  him  to  utter 
in  respect  of  himself.  All  the  weary  and  heavy 
laden  in  this  vast  wilderness  of  wo  are  to  come 
to  him ;  he  has  rest  and  refreshment  for  then' 
all.  He  predominates  over  all  huinan  relations, 
the  nearest  and  the  holiest ;  to  love  father  or 
mother  better  than  him,  is  not  to  be  worthy  of 
him.  He  is  the  Bread  of  God,  whicli  men  may 
cat  of  and  not  die  —  the  Resurrection  and  the 
Life  —  the  Way,  the  Truth,  and  the  Life  —  the 
True  A^ine  —  or,  as  here,  the  Light  of  the  world. 
Surely  this  fact,  tliis  contrast  between  Christ's 
language  a])out  himself,  and  other  good  men's 


CHRIST   THE   LIGHT    OF   THE    WORLD.  71 

language  about  themselves,  may  well  give  rise  to 
profound  meditations ;  the  conclusions  which  we 
may  deduce  from  it  are  of  infinite  importance. 
How  many  heresies  which  have  torn  the  Church 
it  ought  to  have  rendered  for  ever  impossible. 
For  how  impossible  is  it  to  reconcile  these  dec- 
larations of  the  Lord  about  himself  with  any 
other  view  of  the  dignity  of  his  person  save  that 
which  the  Catholic  Church  in  all  ages  has  held. 
He  is  either  that  -which  the  Church  teaches  him 
to  be  —  or  that  which  we  may  well  decline  to 
utter  in  an  assembly  of  Christian  men.  There 
is  no  other  alternative.  If  these  declarations 
which  Christ  makes  about  himself  are  true,  then 
all  temporizing  middle  positions,  Arian,  and 
Unitarian,  are  such  as  it  is  impossible  to  main- 
tain. Men  can  not  rest  in  them  for  long ;  but 
must  either  rise  higher,  that  is,  to  the  faith  of 
the  Church  in  respect  of  her  Lord  ;  or  else  sink 
lower,  and  renounce  the  Lord  of  glory  as  a  de- 
ceiver, or  a  deceived.  For  as  many  as  accei)t 
the  Evangelists'  record  of  our  Lord's  words  as 
perfectly  representing  what  he  did  utter,  unmod- 


72  SERMON    III. 

ified,  uncolored  by  prejudices  and  prepossessions 
of  the  relater,  every  other  position  but  one  of 
these,  is  one  merely  of  transition,  is  one  logically 
untenable,  and  is  sooner  or  later  discovered  to  be 
BO,  and  forsaken. 

A  man  might  claim,  for  instance,  to  be  a  light, 
as  John  "  was  a  burning  and  a  shining  light ;" 
but  what  man  to  be  the  light  ?  Or  he  might 
claim  to  be  the  light  of  some  single  age  or  some 
single  people,  though  in  a  very  secondary  and 
subordinate  sense  ;  but  to  be  "  the  light  of  the 
world,"  who  but  the  Creator  of  the  world  could, 
without  intolerable  presumption,  such  as  would 
convict  him  to  be  not  light  at  all,  but  darkness, 
claim  to  be  this  ?  Others  indeed,  who  had 
caught  some  scattered  rays  of  his  brightness  be- 
fore he  rose  visibly  above  the  horizon,  had  been 
the  light  of  this  lajid  or  of  that ;  of  this  age  or 
the  other.  But,  as  was  said,  in  how  secondary 
and  subordinate  a  sense  !  They  Ijrought  truths, 
but  they  never  brought  the  truth,  to  their  fellow- 
men  ;  for  the  truth  is  one,  whole  and  complete, 
and  to  bring  it  was  reserved  for  him,  who  has 


CHRIST  THE   LIGHT   OF  THE   WORLD.  73 

the  trutli,  because  he  is  the  Truth.  And  then, 
the  truths  which  they  brought,  those  fragments 
broken  from  the  great  body  of  the  truth,  how  far 
mingled  with  falsehoods  they  were,  how  much 
weakened  by  contradictions,  by  contradictions  in 
the  teaching,  by  contradictions  in  the  lives,  of 
those  that  brought  them.  Extensively,  over 
what  narrow  regions  the  sjjiritual  dominion 
which  they  wielded,  reached ;  intensively,  how 
few  the  hearts  which  owned  homage  to  them, 
and  oftentimes  how  slight  the  homage  which  they 
owned.  But  he  is  the  light  of  the  whole  world. 
It  is  of  him  as  of  the  natural  sun  in  the  heavens, 
whereof  the  Psalmist  has  said,  "  His  going  forth 
is  from  the  end  of  the  heaven,  and  his  circuit 
unto  the  ends  of  the  earth,  and  there  is  nothing 
hid  from  the  heat  thereof." 

Nay,  some  would  make  these  words  to  reach 
further  still.  A  great  teacher  of  the  Greek 
Church  is  very  earnest  that  we  should  not  limit 
"  the  world"  here  to  that  world  which  we  inhab- 
it, but  should  give  the  word  a  wider,  and,  as  he 
believes,   its   proper   extension.      Christ   is   the 


7-4  SERMON    III. 

light,  he  urges,  not  of  tnis  "world,  but  of  all 
worlds ;  the  unity  of  that  creation  of  God, 
whereof  this  world  is  only  a  province,  demand- 
ing that  not  man  only,  but  all  the  hierarchy  of 
heaven,  angels,  principalities,  and  powers,  should 
behold  the  glory  of  the  Father  in  the  Son,  that 
in  his  light  they  should  see  light ;  so  that  to  re- 
fuse or  reject  him  is  to  put  ourselves  out  of  har- 
mony with  all  creation,  with  the  moral  law  not 
of  this  world  only,  but  of  all  worlds.  I  will  not 
at  the  present  pause  to  inquire  whether  this  ex- 
tended meaning  may  be  justly  given  to  Christ's 
language  here ;"  whether  he  is  claiming  here  to 
be  the  light-bringer  and  light-giver  to  all  crea- 
tion, as  indeed  he  is ;  and  not  to  our  world 
alone.  The  words  have  a  meaning  sufficiently 
august,  when  we  limit  them  to  our  own  world, 
which  he,  the  Sun  of  righteousness,  illumines ; 
and  this  meaning  will  abundantly  occupy  us 
to-day. 

But  in  what  senses,  it  may  be  asked,  is  Christ 
tlio  light  of  the  world  ?  In  many.  He  is  the 
light,  inasmuch   as   the   Spirit   which   proceeds 


CHEIST   THE  LIGHT   OF   THE   WORLD.  75 

from  him,  which  never  would  have  reached  men 
except  through  hhii,  that  Spirit,  being  a  holy 
Spirit,  preserves  them  in  whom  he  dwells  from 
those  sins  which  cloud  the  intellect  and  darken 
the  understanding,  quite  as  surely  and  effectually 
as  they  defile  the  heart  and  lay  waste  the  affec- 
tions. It  is  the  mists  of  earth,  the  steam  and 
vapors  rising  up  from  beneath,  which  blot  out 
the  heavenly  constellations  above.  Now  he  pre- 
vents these  mists  from  gathering,  or  scatters 
them  when  they  are  gathered ;  and  thus  the  en- 
trance of  his  word  giveth  light  —  or,  as  the 
Psalmist  boldly  declared,  he  had  more  under- 
standing than  the  ancients  ;  —  and  why?  because 
he  kept  the  commandments.  Christ  is  thus  the 
true  educator  of  the  intellect  of  man,  inasmuch 
as  he  is  the  only  purifier  of  the  heart  of  man. 
0  brethren,  of  how  many  nien  it  is  true  that 
they  must  be  better  men,  holier  men,  before  ever 
they  can  be  wiser  men ;  that  they  have  been 
bribed  to  perverse  conclusions  of  their  intellects 
by  the  corrupt  affections  of  their  hearts,  that 
only  through  these  they  have  arrived  at  those ; 


76  SERMON    III. 

for  God,  by  an  unchanging  law  of  his  moral  uni- 
verse, scatters  his  penal  blindnesses  as  the  pun- 
ishment of  our  unlawful  desires  ;  and  that  prom- 
ise of  Christ,  "  If  any  man  will  do  his  will,  he 
shall  know  of  the  doctrine  whether  it  be  of  God" 
— that  promise  has  its  darker  side  also,  upon 
which  it  is  not  a  promise,  but  a  threat :  If  any 
man  will  not  do  his  will,  he  shall  not  know  of 
the  doctrine  whether  it  be  of  God. 

I  do  not,  of  course,  pretend  to  say  that  there 
are  not  kinds  of  knowledge  as  much  within  the 
reach  of  the  impure  as  the  pure,  of  the  proud 
as  the  humble — in  which  men  may  make  prog- 
ress, yea,  and  win  the  garland,  such  as  it  will 
be,  quite  irrespective  of  their  moral  condition. 
But  so  soon  as  ever  a  moral  element  mingles  with 
any  study  —  and  how  soon  it  does  so,  how  well- 
nigh  impossible  it  is,  except  in  the  domain  of 
pure  science,  to  keep  it  aloof — then  at  once  they 
are  at  a  disadvantage ;  and  the  larger  this  moral 
element,  the  nearer  the  relation  which  any  study 
bears  to  God  and  the  knowledge  of  him,  by  so 
much  the  greater  the  hinderance  they  will  find. 


CHRIST   THE   LIGHT   OF   THE   WORLD.  77 

"  Blessed  are  the  pure  of  heart,  for  they  shall 
see  God ;"  and  each  approach  to  this  purity, 
eacli  advance  in  it,  is  a  cleansing  and  brightening 
of  that  mirror  in  which  alone  the  truth,  which  is 
God's  daughter  upon  earth,  can  be  discerned ; 
each  allowed  impurity,  be  it  of  the  flesh  or  of  the 
spirit,  a  tarnishing  and  darkening  of  the  same, 
so  that  it  shall  give  no  clear  and  undistorted  im- 
age back. 

But  Christ  is  "  the  light  of  the  world"  in  a  yet 
higher  sense,  for  it  is  possible  to  conceive  one 
higher ;  not  merely  as  preserving  clear  and  pure 
and  undistorted,  the  medium  through  which 
knowledge  can  be  attained ;  not  merely  as  keep- 
ing healthy  and  single  the  eye  by  which  it  is  dis- 
cerned ;  —  he  not  merely  enables  men  thus  to  ac- 
quire truth,  but  he  is  "  the  fountain  light  of  all 
our  seeing"  by  a  yet  higher  title,  as  he  is  the 
truth ;  for  he  that  hath  seen  him  hath  seen  the 
'-"aiher ;  and  the  Father  we  know  is  light,  and  in 
I  Im  is  no  darkness  at  all.  Such  then  as  the 
Father  is,  su^h  is  the  Son,  "  light  of  light ;"  the 
light  of  the  world,  as  bringing  into  it  the  true 


78  SERMON   III. 

knowledge  of  God,  the  light  of  the  knowledge 
of  the  glory  of  God  shining  in  the  face  of  Christ 
Jesus,  and  from  liim  reflected  upon  us.  When 
he  came,  the  people  that  sat  in  darkness  (and  all 
people  sat  in  darkness,  though  some  in  thicker 
than  others),  saw  a  great  light ;  and  wherever 
men  loved  that  light,  and  came  to  it,  and  did  not 
hide  themselves  from  it,  there  all  the  foul  and 
hideous  forms  of  superstition  and  error,  which 
the  slime  of  tlie  earth  had  gendered,  perished  at 
his  presence,  as  in  heathen  legend  the  brood  of 
the  Python  died  beneath  the  glittering  shafts  of 
the  god  of  day. 

Let  me  add,  too,  that  Christ  being  the  central 
person  of  all  time,  in  whom  the  history  of  the  old 
world  ended,  from  whom  the  history  of  the  new 
world  began,  he  has,  or  rather  himself  is,  "  the 
key  of  knowledge,"  the  key  to  the  right  under- 
standing of  all  mythology,  all  history,  all  philos- 
opliy,  all  art,  with  each  other  more  serious  'vc 
earnest  activity  of  the  mind  of  man.  And  they 
who,  casting  him  aside,  or  leavinp-  Lim  o';.t,  who 
saying  of  him,  "  What  is  this  man  xore  than  an 


CHRIST   THE   LIGHT   OF   THE   WORLD.  79 

other  ?"  seek  to  enter  into  the  understanding  of 
any  of  these,  are  as  men  that  having  some  hard 
problem  to  solve,  first  deliberately  exclude  tlie 
only  right  solution,  and,  this  done,  perplex 
themselves  end_essly  with  seeking  an  explana- 
tion which  they  have  themselves  rendered  it  im- 
possible that  they  can  ever  find. 

In  these  ways  then,  brethren,  is  Christ  "  the 
light  of  the  world ;"  and  the  promise  which  he, 
as  such,  makes  is  this,  that  he  who  follnweth  him 
"  shall  not  walk  in  darkness,  but  have  the  light 
of  life."  This  walking  in  darkness,  which  is  the 
result  of  nut  following  him,  what  is  it?  We 
must  not  suppose,  for  the  most  part,  that  it  is 
anything  which  overtakes  a  man  all  of  a  sudden. 
Little  Ijy  little,  by  unmarked  insidious  approach- 
es, the  darkness  which  is  in  him  (and  there  is 
darkness  in  every  man)  encroaches  on  the  light, 
advances  its  own  frontiers,  narrows  the  domain 
of  the  light ;  and  then  if,  as  is  too  often  the  case, 
what  is  once  lost  is  never  won  back,  no  gains 
compensating  continual  losses,  the  darkness  in 
the  end  covers  all.     To  walk  in  darkness,  it  is 


80  SERMON   III. 

to  see  the  lode-stars  of  our  spiritual  heaven,  the 
truths  by  which  we  live,  going  out  one  by  one  — 
to  watch  them  each  day  waxing  fainter  and  dim- 
mer and  remote,  with  less  of  comfort,  with  less 
of  guidance  in  them,  till  at  leng-l:  they  disappear, 
and  our  eyes  see  them  no  more ;  these  disappear- 
ing lights  being  not  merely  the  special  truths  of 
revelation  and  of  the  life  11  Christ,  but  all  where- 
by any  moral  being  is  sustained  in  the  soul — be- 
lief in  God,  in  goodness,  in  the  freedom  of  the 
will,  in  duty,  in  responsibility,  in  immortality,  in 
an  answer  beyond  the  grave  for  the  things  done 
in  the  body.  To  relax  our  hold  on  all  these,  to 
suffer  them  one  by  one  to  be  taken  from  us,  and 
to  feel,  it  may  be,  content,  well  pleased  to  let 
them  go,  this  is  to  walk  in  darkness. 

This  surely  is  the  saddest  of  all,  when  men 
thus  accept  their  darkness,  L,cquiesce  in  it,  are 
better  pleased  with  the  darkness  in  which  all 
may  be  huddled  up,  than  with  the  'ight  wnich 
shows  and  searches  out  all.  It  is  sad  enough  to 
have  the  world,  and  our  own  place  and  meaning 
in  it,  as  an  unsolved  riddle  to  us,  the  burden  of 


CHRIST   THK    LMJHT    OP   THE   WORLD.  81 

the  mystery  weighing  on  us  with  a  weight  which 
sometimes  threatens  to  crush  out  the  life  of  our 
spirits.  But  it  is  a  far  sadder  thing  yet,  when 
all  this  ceases  to  be  a  riddle  or  mystery  to  us  at 
all,  not  because  we  have  read  it  in  the  light  of 
faith,  not  because  that  has  made  all  things  plain, 
but  because  we  have  renounced  all  hope,  all 
care,  all  desire  to  have  it  solved  at  all,  because 
we  have  learned  to  smile  as  with  superior  scorn 
on  the  past  perplexities  of  our  spirits,  on  the  ob- 
stinate questionings,  the  "  What  am  I  ?"  and 
"  Where  am  I?"  and  "  Whither  am  I  tending?" 
which  visited  us  once ;  and,  dismissing  all  these 
as  the  hypochondria  of  the  spirit,  have  come  to 
regard  the  world  as  a  convenient  feeding-trough, 
being  resolved  to  make  it  yield  what  it  can  yield 
after  its  kind  in  the  shape  of  pleasures  or  honors 
or  riches  or  enjoyments,  to  shut  in  our  spirits 
within  the  limits  of  these  earthly  things,  to  mind 
them,  to  acknowledge  and  trouble  ourselves  with 
nothing  beyond.  This  is  a  cure  indeed  of  the 
sickness  of  the  spirit ;  but  it  is  the  cure  of  death: 
there  may  be  calm  now,  if  it  deserve  this  name, 


82  SKRMON    Til. 

where  there  were  restless  agitations  before  ;  but 
it  is  the  hopeless  calm  of  the  grave. 

Nor  may  we  suppose,  my  brethren,  that  dark- 
ness, spiritual  darkness  at  least,  is  a  mere  ab- 
sence of  light.  It  is  itself  an  evil  power  and 
presence  in  the  soul.  There  is,  and  there  can 
be,  no  vacuum  in  the  heart  of  man.  What  the 
truth  does  not  fill,  lies  will  fill.  Who  does  not 
obey  the  one,  must  obey  the  other.  They  are 
Satan's  slaves  who  will  not  be  Christ's  freemen, 
and  in  one  shape  or  another  they  must  do  his 
work,  and  receive  his  wages.  It  was  boldly 
said  by  one  of  old,  "  All  the  way  to  heaven  is 
heaven"  —  perhaps  over-boldly  said,  by  one  who 
forgot  for  a  moment  what  life  has  of  burden  and 
of  toil  even  for  the  faithful  man.  And  yet  these 
words  have  their  truth  ;  and  being  true,  they  are 
true  also  in  their  converse  ;  and  if  all  the  way  to 
heaven  is  heaven,  God  blessing  even  now  with 
infinite  blessings  his  servants  that  walk  in  that 
way,  so  too,  which  is  the  same  truth  on  its  sadder 
ind  its  sterner  side,  all  the  way  to  hell  is  hell  : 

Vestibulum  ante  ipsum,  primisque  in  faucibus  Orci 
Luctus  et  ultrices  posuere  cubilia  Curaj, 
Pallcntcscjue  lial)itaiit  Moibi,  tristisquc  Scnectus. 


(!HRIST   THE    LIGHT    OF   TIIK    WOULD.  80 

In  that  '■\ferlorn  old  age"  liow  awfully  does  the 
great  religious  poet  of  Rome  put  the  last  terri- 
l>lc  touch  to  his  picture;  in  that  single  epithet 
summing  up  all  —  the  life  which  is  life  no  longer, 
the  vita  non  vitalis,  in  which  all  springs  of  joys 
are  dried  up,  in  which  the  man  has  overlived 
himself,  his  joys,  and,  which  perhaps  is  sadder 
still,  even  his  sorrows  —  the  life,  it  may  be, 
which  in  its  outward  desolation  and  abandon- 
ment, without  honor,  without  love,  is  only  too 
faithful  an  index  of  that  which  is  within  —  the 
life  from  which  all  the  grace  and  ornament  of 
life  have  departed ;  till  he  that  bears  is  now 
weary  of  it,  and  desires  only  to  creep  by  obscure 
and  narrow  passages  to  his  grave. 

Which  of  us,  my  brethren,  would  have  this  the 
end?  And  yet  our  lives  may  only  too  easily 
have  such  an  issue  as  this.  Such  an  issue  lies 
in  wait  for  every  one  of  us.  Look  around  you, 
and  sec,  of  how  many  who  began  well,  with  far 
other  auspices,  is  there  presently  occasion  to 
mourn  for  the  defeated  promise  of  their  youth, 
fo:  the  spring  which  no  sunimor  followed,  for  the 


84  SERMON    III. 

buds  which  never  unfolded  into  flowers.  You 
have  known  some  such,  who  for  a  time  walked, 
if  not  with  a  personal  Saviour,  yet  with  high 
purposes,  and  no  ignoble  scheme  for  their  life; 
but  who  now  have  quite  gone  back  from  these, 
and  arc  well-nigh  ashamed  that  they  ever  enter- 
tained them.  Surely  it  is  a  matter  of  deepest 
interest,  one  which  concerns  each  of  us  most 
nearly,  to  discover  where  the  flaw  was,  what 
hindered  the  orderly  development  of  a  spiritual 
life  in  them  ;  how  it  befell  that  having  come  out, 
at  least  in  part,  into  the  light,  the  darkness  over- 
took them  again.  The  fault  and  the  flaw  was 
here,  in  the  leaving  out  of  that  all-important  con- 
dition which  the  Saviour  puts — "He  that  fol- 
loweth  me.  shall  not  walk  in  darkness."  Com- 
munion with  a  personal  God  and  Saviour,  a 
patient  following  of  him,  this  is  the  one  condi- 
tion of  indeed  coming  out  of  the  darkness  of 
nature  into  the  light  of  grace ;  and,  having  come 
out,  the  one  condition  of  abiding  in  that  light 
and  not  being  again  swallowed  up  by  that  durk- 
ne?-s  fi-om  which  we  seemed   to   liave   escaped 


CHRIST   THK    LIGHT   OF   THE   WORLD.  85 

They  whom  wc  deplore,  forgot  this ;  they  set 
before  them,  it  may  be,  some  lofty  ideal  for  their 
lives  to  which  they  were  determined  to  conform  ; 
but  it  was  one  of  their  own  fashioning ;  and  they 
relied  for  its  carrying  out  on  innate  forces  of 
their  own ;  and  thus  the  world  was  too  strong 
for  thern^  and  not  they  for  the  world.  They  had 
not  calculated  on  the  strength,  the  subtlety,  the 
pertinacity  of  the  opposing  forces  which  it  would 
bring  to  bear  against  them.  The  impulses  which 
first  bore  them  forward  to  do  battle  with  it, 
were  presently  spent  and  exhausted  ;  they  had 
no  power  to  renew  them,  and  no  other  to  supply 
their  place.  Had  they  leaned  upon  a  higher 
strength,  had  their  eyes  been  toward  the  Lord, 
had  they  followed  him,  then  they  too,  like  the 
warriors  of  Gideon,  might  have  been  often 
"  faint,"  but,  like  them,  they  would  still  have 
been  "  pursuing."  The  darkness  might  have 
gathered  round  them  for  a  while,  but,  children 
of  the  light  and  of  the  day,  they  would  presently 
have  emerged  from  it  again. 

"  He   that   followeth  mr  shall  have  the    lio-ht 


86  SEkMON  in. 

of  life."  Be  it  ours,  brethren,  to  make  this 
glorious  promise  our  own.  For  "  to  have  the 
light  of  lifo/'  what  is  it?  It  is  to  be  in  fel- 
lowship with  him  who  is  at  once  the  light  and 
the  life  of  men ;  and  in  this  fellowship  to  be- 
come more  and  more  a  child  of  light,  for  whom 
the  darkness  is  now  past,  the  darkness  of  a  self- 
ish, the  darkness  of  a  proud,  tlic  darkness  of  an 
unholy  heart,  and  for  whom  the  true  light  now 
sliincth.  That  light  thou  mayest  make,  if  thou 
wilt,  more  and  more  thine  own,  mayest  clothe 
thyself  with  it,  till  it  be  to  thee  armor  of  light, 
at  once  a  sun  and  a  shield,  a  glory  and  a  de- 
fence. Arrayed  in  this,  thou  mayest  pass  un- 
harmed through  all  the  temptations  of  this 
world ;  till  thou,  being  brought  at  length  into 
a  meetness  for  the  inheritance  of  the  saints  in 
light,  shalt  stand,  all  unawares  it  may  be,  with- 
in the  gates  of  that  heavenly  City,  which  need- 
eth  neither  sun  nor  moon,  "  for  the  glory  of  the 
Lord  doth  lighten  it,  and  the  Lamb  is  the  light 
thereof." 


SERMON    IV. 


CHRIST  THE  TRUE  VINE. 


SERMON   lY. 

CHRIST  THE  TRUE  VINE. 

JOHX  XV.  1,  2. 

I  am  tho  true  Vine,  and  my  Father  is  the  husbandman. 
Every  branch  in  me  that  beareth  not  fruit  he  taketh  away; 
and  every  branch  that  beareth  fruit,  he  purgeth  it,  that  it  may 
bring  forth  more  fruit. 

In  this  image  of  the  vine  and  the  vine  branch- 
es, the  mystical  union  which  is  between  Christ 
and  his  people,  the  closeness  and  the  reciprocity 
of  it,  he  in  them,  and  they  in  him,  is  set  out 
more  distinctly  than  perhaps  in  any  other  figu- 
rative language  which  holy  Scripture  employs. 
This  union  does  not  lie  at  all  in  some  of  the 
leading  images  which  are  there  employed  to  set 
forth  this  relation ;  as,  for  instance,  in  Christ  as 


90  SERMON   IV. 

the  good  Shepherd,  the  faithful  as  his  sheep.  It 
is  only  brought  in,  as  it  were  by  a  certain  force, 
into  others  ;  as  in  Christ  the  living  corner-stone, 
his  people  the  lively  stones  built  upon  him :  al- 
though it  is  a  singular  evidence  of  the  manner  in 
which  the  sacred  writers  were  full  of  this  blessed 
truth  of  Christ's  innermost  union  with  his  peo- 
ple, that  in  an  image  so  little  seeming  to  favor, 
or  even  to  tolerate,  it  as  that  of  the  dead  stones 
of  the  building,  it  does  force  its  way,  and  Christ 
becomes  a  living'  corner-stone,  "  in  whom  all  the 
building  groiveth  unto  a  holy  temple  in  the 
Lord."  Here,  however,  there  is  no  need  of  any 
such  forcing.  This  union  lies  naturally  in  the 
words.  It  is  indeed  the  truth,  which  above  all 
other  truths  the  language  that  our  Lord  uses, 
suggests ;  and  which  therefore,  having  these 
words  for  our  text,  will  most  fitly  occupy  us  to- 
day. 

It  needs  not  curiously  to  inquire  here  what 
was  the  immediate  motive  for  the  selection  of 
this  image ;  whether,  as  some  suppose,  a  vine 
had  entwined  its  tendrils  round  tlie  guest-cham- 


CHRIST   THE    TRUE    VINE.  91 

ber,  where  the  Lord  and  his  disciples  had  par- 
taken of  their  last  and  ever-memorable  meal ; 
or,  as  others  suggest,  tliat,  having  left  that  cham- 
ber, they  were  now  passing  through  some  vine- 
yards on  their  way  to  the  l»rook  Cedron  and  the 
garden  beyond ;  or  that  Christ  alludes  to  that 
famous  vine,  all  of  solid  gold,  with  which,  as  a 
symbol  of  the  theocracy,  Herod  had  adorned  the 
temple  he  rebuilt,  and  silently  contrasts  himself 
with  it.  No  one  of  these  suppositions  much  com- 
mends itself  to  us  ;  they  are  all,  moreover,  unne- 
cessary. The  Lord  required  no  such  suggestions 
from  without.  The  entire  kingdoms  of  art  and 
of  nature  lay  ever  open  before  his  eyes,  with  all 
the  most  secret  essences  of  things,  for  him  to 
select  from  their  ample  treasure-house  what  best 
suited  his  present  need,  whatever  would  best  em- 
body that  spiritual  truth  which  he  now  was  fain 
to  declare. 

So  far  as  Christ  did  receive  a  suggestion  to 
these  words,  it  was  one  derived  from  those  many 
passages  in  the  Old  Testament  in  which  Israel, 
or  the  people  of  God,  is  spoken  of  under  the 


92  SERMON   IV. 

type  and  image  of  a  Vine ;  and  in  tins  fact  we 
have  the  explanation  of  that  "  true"  ("  I  am  the 
true  Vine")  which  he  claims  for  himself.  For 
whenever  he  uses  this  word  "  true"  about  him- 
self, or  whenever  St.  John  uses  it  about  him,  he 
claims,  or  it  is  claimed  for  him,  not  so  much  that 
he  is  the  true  as  contrasted  with  the  false,  but 
rather  the  perfect  as  distinguished  from  the  im- 
perfect, as  differenced  from  that  which  falls 
short  of,  and  only  incompletely  realizes,  its  own 
ideal,  only  partially  fulfils  the  promise  which, 
according  to  its  name,  it  made.  Thus  when 
elsewhere  Christ  announces  of  himself,  "I  am 
the  true  bread  that  came  down  from  heaven,"  he 
does  not  deny  that  Moses  gave  to  the  people 
bread  from  heaven,  for  "  man  did  eat  angels' 
food ;"  he  only  afi&rms  that  it  was  not  such  that 
a  man  might  eat  thereof  and  not  die ;  that  it 
was  not,  as  his  flesh  was,  the  food  and  medicine 
of  immortality.  So  again,  when  St.  John  says 
of  him,  "  that  was  the  true  light,"  he  would  by 
no  means  imply  that  every  other  was  a  meteor 
or  an  ignis-fatuus,  misleading  and  betraying,  but 


CHRIST   THE    TRUE    VINE.  93 

only  that  his  relation  to  "  the  Father  of  Lights" 
transcended  that  of  every  other,  and  was  indeed 
absolute  and  supreme ;  so  that  no  higher  could 
be  conceived. 

Exactly  in  the  same  way  in  this  "  I  am  the 
true  Vine,"  Christ  does  not  deny,  but  rather  al- 
low, to  Israel  the  title  of  God's  vine,  which  is  so 
often  given  to  it  in  Scripture,  as  in  that  80th 
Psalm,  "  Thou  hast  brought  a  vine  out  of  Egypt ; 
thou  hast  cast  out  the  heathen,  and  planted  it ;" 
and  again,  in  another  place,  "  I  planted  thee  a 
noble  vine,  wholly  a  right  seed."  What  he  does 
affirm  is,  that  Israel  was  not  God's  true  vine ; 
that  it  did  not  answer,  but  disappointed  and  de- 
feated, the  expectations  and  intentions  of  him 
that  planted  it.  Israel  was  an  empty  vine, 
bringing  forth  fruit  to  itself,  and  not  to  him. 
Elect  though  that  people  had  been,  the  salvation 
of  the  nations  was  not,  as  it  might  have  been,  in 
it ;  the  nations  did  not,  as  fruitful  suckers,  at- 
tach themselves  to  it.  The  goodly  plant  which 
he  had  planted  on  the  mountains  of  Israel  was 
turned  into  the  degenerate  plant  of  a  strange 


94  SERMON   IV. 

vine  unto  him  — "  the  vine  of  the  earth,"  whose 
clusters,  after  infinite  long-sufiering,  were  gath- 
ered and  cast  into  the  great  wine-press  of  the 
wrath  of  Almighty  God,  and  trodden  there. 
Still  for  all  this  there  had  been  a  time  when 
Israel  was  most  really  God's  vine,  just  as  it  was 
God's  son  ("  out  of  Egypt  have  I  called  my 
son")  ;  while  yet  even  then  it  was  not  his  true 
Son,  any  more  than  his  true  Vine,  inasmuch  as 
it  fell  infinitely  short  of  all  which  one  name  and 
the  other  involved. 

Christ,  then,  in  that  "  true"  not  contrasting 
himself  with  the  natural  vine,  but,  so  to  speak, 
with  the  morale  with  that  which  only  in  part  ful- 
filled the  promise  of  its  name,  claims  for  himself 
to  be  the  single  one  to  whom  this  title  by  highest 
title  competed,  in  whom  alone  its  promise  was 
completely  fulfilled ;  who,  trodden  in  the  wine- 
press should  yield,  as  none  other  had  yielded  or 
could  yield,  the  wine  that  maketh  glad  the  heart 
of  God  and  men. 

I  asked  you  last  Sunday  to  observe  the  calm 
yet  deliberate  self-assertion  of  our  Lord  ;  and  J 


CHRIST  THE   TRUE   VINE.  95 

shall  not  urge  this  again.  You  will  not,  how- 
ever, fail  to  note  how  it  repeats  itself  here. 
And  in  further  following  up  of  a  not  dissimilar 
meditation  you  will  note  as  well,  how  all  things 
fairest  and  loveliest  in  the  natural  world  are  vin- 
dicated for  himself  by  him,  who  is  "  fairer  than 
the  children  of  men,"  and  who  claims  all  these 
as  weak  types  and  faint  reflections  of  his  perfect 
beauty."  Thus  the  light  is  lovely,  and  tlie  con- 
dition of  beholding  all  loveliness,  and  we  have 
heard  him  saying,  "  I  am  the  Light  of  the 
world."  The  starry  host  of  heaven  presents  a 
spectacle  of  unequalled  magnificence ;  of  this 
host  he  singles  out  the  best  and  brightest  for  his 
own,  and  proclaims,  "  I  am  the  bright  and  the 
Morning  Star."  Thus,  too,  the  vine  being  every- 
where in  Scripture  by  just  right  the  type  of  all 
things  fair  and  gracious  and  fruitful,  he  who  is 
altogether  lovely  appropriates  this  name  also  as 
his  own  ;  — "  I  am  the  true  Vine"  —  the  kingdom 
of  nature  Ijcing  a  prophecy  of  the  kingdom  of 
grace ;  even  as  the  kingdom  of  grace  is  a  fulfil- 
ment of  those  prophecies  of  nature ;  and  he  who 


96  SERMON   IV. 

SO  spake,  herein  affirming  that  he  is  the  kingdora 
of  grace  realized  to  the  full  whatever  was  faintly 
shadowed  forth  by  the  vine  and  the  vine  branch- 
es in  that  of  nature. 

But  what  was  it,  we  may  reverently  ask,  which 
enabled  him  to  speak  this  language  ?  How  is 
he  this  true  Vine,  the  root  and  stock  and  stem 
of  a  new  humanity  ?  Is  it  in  his  human  nature, 
as  the  Man  Christ  Jesus  ?  or  is  it  as  he  is  the 
Son  of  the  Father,  and  himself  God  from  ever- 
lasting? Neither  answer  would  be  perfectly 
complete.  We  should  answer  rather,  as  he,  be- 
ing God  and  Man,  was  one  Christ.  There  need- 
ed indeed  his  Godhead,  underlying  his  manhood, 
and  penetrating  it  through  and  through  with  its 
own  potency  and  power ;  else  he  could  not  have 
been  life-giving,  having  life  in  himself,  a  divine 
energy  which  he  communicated  to  others.  But 
there  needed  also  in  him  who  should  be  the  true 
Vine,  whereof  men  should  be  the  branches,  a 
veritable  humanity  as  well.  Only  by  sinking 
himself  in  our  nature,  by  himself  becoming  the 
very  root  out  of  which  it  grew,  could  he  have 


CHRIST  THE  TRUE   VINE,  97 

spread  and  diffused  himself  through  a  race  of 
regenerate  renewed  men,  only  by  himself  becom- 
ing partaker  of  a  human  nature,  could  they  have 
become  partakers  of  a  divine.  Being  God,  he 
has  his  roots  in  heaven ;  for  the  natural  order 
which  places  the  roots  below,  and  the  branches 
above,  is  here  inverted ;  and  from  these  roots 
our  life  is  drawn.  Being  man,  he  has  also  what 
without  this  manhood  he  could  never  have  had, 
his  branches  upon  earth,  or  men  for  his  brethren. 
Neither  then  as  God^exclusively,  nor  as  man  ex- 
clusively, is  he  the  true  Vine,  but  as,  being  God 
and  man,  the  divine  and  human  are  united  and 
married  in  one  Christ. 

He  proceeds,  "  And  my  Father  is  the  husband- 
man." Here,  as  so  often,  Christ's  greatness  goes 
hand  in  hand  with  his  humility,  and  he  himself 
brings  them  into  closest  contact.  He  who  de- 
clares  himself  to  be  the  true  Vine,  in  the  same 
breath  declares  his  Father  to  be  the  husbandman 
—  the  husbandman,  as  the  place  of  the  words 
plainly  shows,  of  the  whole  Vine ;  not  of  the 
branches  only,  but  of  the  stock  and  stem  as  well 


98  SERMON   IV. 

Our  Lord  will  by  no  means  exclude  himself  from 
his  heavenly  Father's  husbandry;  lor  he  too 
brought  his  own  will  into  submission  to  his  Fa- 
ther's, drank  of  the  cup  which  his  Father  had 
mingled,  was  pruned  to  the  quick  by  tlic  knife 
of  aflQiction  which  his  Father  bore  for  him  as 
well  as  for  others ;  in  all  points  learned  obe- 
dience by  the  things  which  he  suffered ;  and  only 
through  this,  his  own  obedience  to  death,  became 
the  author  of  everlasting  salvation  to  all  them 
that  obeyed  him. 

But  while  Christ  thus  does  not  exclude  him- 
self from  his  heavenly  Father's  husbandry,  it  is 
not  of  himself  that  he  is  cliiefly  speaking,  when 
he  says,  "  My  Father  is  the  husbandman  ;"  —  of 
us  rather,  of  the  branches,  not  of  the  stem ;  as 
they  need  this  husbandry  far  more ;  the  best 
needing  to  be  pruned,  the  worst  requiring  to  be 
taken  away.  The  best,  that  is  the  fruit-bearing, 
need  to  be  pruned.  "  Every  branch  in  me  that 
beareth  fruit,  he  purgeth  [or  pruncth]  it,  that  it 
may  bring  forth  more  fruit."  There  is  some- 
thing very  noticeable  lierc,  a  certain  austerity, 


CHRIST  THE  TRUE   VINE.  99 

which  we  may  sometimes  mark  even  in  the  very 
promises  of  God.  The  fruit-bearing  branches, 
how  shall  it  fare  with  them  ?  what  reward  shall 
they  have  ?  They  shall  be  pruned ;  their  too 
luxuriant  shoots  shall  be  checked,  which  often- 
times can  only  be  done  by  a  far  sharper  disci- 
pline, a  far  keener  use  of  the  pruning-hook,  than 
they  would  willingly  have  chosen  for  themselves. 
Christ  pledges  the  faithfulness  of  his  Father,  that 
he,  the  great  Yine-dresser,  in  that  his  very  faith- 
fulness will  not  leave  his  own  without  that  chas- 
tening which  they  shall  need  for  their  perfection ; 
this  chastening  being  itself  a  part  of  their  re- 
ward. It  is  one  of  those  mysterious  promises, 
which  sound  so  strangely  except  to  the  ears  of 
faith ;  greatly  resembling  that  other  which  the 
Lord  made  to  the  two  aspiring  disciples  —  "Ye 
shall  drink  of  my  cup  ;"  "  Ye  shall  be  baptized 
with  my  baptism ;"  drink  of  his  cup  of  pain,  be 
baptized  with  his  baptism  of  suffering  ;  which, 
threat  as  it  would  have  sounded  in  carnal  ears, 
was  as  a  promise  in  theirs ;  and  did  not  repel,  but 
rather  allured  and  drew  them  vet  closer  to  him. 


100  SERMON   IV. 

And  not  less  significant  the  intention  of  this 
their  pruning — "  that  they  may  bring  forth  more 
fruit,"  more  fruit  of  faith,  of  patience,  of  love. 
My  brethren,  of  how  many  of  God's  dealings 
with  his  elect  have  we  here  the  explanation. 
We  sometimes  wonder  with  regard  to  some  of 
these,  that  he  should  cast  them  again  and  again 
into  the  crucible  of  trial ;  it  seems  to  us  as 
though  they  were  already  refined  gold.  But  he 
sees  that  in  them  which  we  do  not  see,  a  further 
fineness  which  is  possible ;  and  he  will  not  give 
over,  till  that  be  attained.  It  is  just  as  in  a  por- 
trait by  some  cunning  artist,  which  is  now  draw- 
ing near  to  its  completion.  Men  look  at  it,  and 
count  it  perfect,  and  are  well-nigh  impatient  that 
the  artist  does  not  now  withhold  his  hand,  and 
declare  it  finished ;  while  he,  knowing  better, 
touches  and  retouches,  returns  again  and  again 
to  his  work.  And  why  ?  Because  there  floats 
before  him  an  ideal  of  possible  excellence  at 
which  he  has  not  yet  arrived  ;  but  which  he  will 
not  rest  nor  be  content  till  he  has  embodied  in 
his  work.     It  is  thus  with  God  and  some  of  his 


CHRIST   THE   TRUE   VINE.  101 

elect  servants.  Men,  seeing  their  graces  which 
so  far  exceed  those  of  common  men,  wonder 
sometimes  why  they  should  suffer  still ;  why  they 
seem  to  be  ever  falling  from  one  sorrow  to  an- 
other. But  he  sees  in  them  that  which  no  other 
eye  can  see  —  the  grace  which  is  capable  of  be- 
coming more  gracious  still ;  and  in  his  very 
faithfulness  he  will  not  deprive  them,  or  suffer 
them  to  come  short,  of  this.  They  are  fruit- 
bearing  branches,  and  because  they  are  so,  he 
purges  them,  "  that  they  may  bring  forth  more 
fruit."  My  brethren,  how  blessed  must  God's 
service  be,  when  he  can  give  nothing  better  to 
his  servants  in  reward  of  their  obedience,  than 
the  ability  to  serve  him  more  and  better ;  and,  if 
we  may  safely  judge  from  the  analogy  of  the  pas- 
sage before  us,  and  other  like  ones,  how  different 
must  heaven  itself  be  from  the  anticipation  and 
imagination  of  carnal  men.  They  seem  to  think 
that  a  certain  amount  of  disagreeable,  unwel- 
come work  for  God  must  be  here  undergone,  that 
so  they  may  be  excused  and  exempted  from  all 
work  hereafter ;  wc  gathering  from  these  Scrip- 


102  SERMON   IV. 

tures  rather,  that  heaven  is  not  a  ceasing  to 
work  for  God,  but  is  work  in  a  wider  sphere, 
and  in  the  spirit  of  a  freer,  more  joyful  obe- 
dience ;  according  to  those  wonderful  words  of 
the  Apocalypse,  "  His  servants  shall  serve  him ;" 
they  shall  rule  over  their  ten  cities  in  recogTiition 
of  their  ten  talents  duly  laid  out :  just  as  on  the 
other  hand  the  penalty  of  not  bearing  fruit  is  the 
not  being  able  to  bear,  the  very  capacity  of  ser- 
vice being  withdrawn  and  taken  away. 

For  we  must  not  leave  out  of  sight  this  side  of 
our  Lord's  words  :  "  Every  branch  in  me  that 
beareth  not  fruit,  he  taketh  away."  First,  how- 
ever, observe  that  "in  me"  —  "every  branch  in 
w?e;"  for  there  is  the  stress  of  their  guilt  whom 
these  barren  branches  represent ;  inasmuch  as 
there  lay  the  possibility  of  their  fruitfulness. 
They  are  branches  in  him,  and  yet  for  all  this 
barren  and  unfruitful ;  joined  to  him,  and  yet 
not  receiving  life  from  him,  the  channels  by 
which  his  grace  might  have  been  received  into 
their  souls  being  obstructed  by  sin  and  unbelief. 
In  tlioir  baptisms  they  were  ingrafted  upon  him ; 


CHRIST  THE  TRUE   VINE.  lOo 

they  were  made  branches  in  him;  and  yet  they 
would  not  draw  life  from  him ;  but  refusing  him, 
chose  rather  to  draw  death  from  the  stock  of 
that  old  corrupt  nature,  which  they  might  have 
now  disowned  and  utterly  renounced.  There- 
fore they  are  "  taken  away."  But,  putting  the 
whole  of  this  passage,  and  not  merely  the  two 
verses  which  constitute  my  text,  together,  there 
is  a  step  before  this  in  the  progress  of  their 
doom,  "  they  are  withered ;"  and  a  step  after 
this,  "they  are  burned;"  or  putting  all  in  their 
order,  they  are  first  withered,  then  taken  away, 
and  then  burned.  They  arc  withered — the  life 
of  their  souls,  the  joy,  the  hope,  the  faith,  the 
love,  all  these  dry  up.  How  should  tliey  not, 
when  the  fountains  which  should  feed  them  are 
stopped,  or  at  least  all  connection  with  these 
fountains  broken  off?  What  a  mournful  thing, 
this  withering  of  which  the  Lord  speaks,  and  yet 
how  frequent !  Strange  as  it  may  sound,  how 
many  a  man  has  followed  himself  to  his  owni 
grave.  He  is  no  mourner  (would  he  were,  for 
then  there  might  still  be  hope),  but  he  is  an 


104  SERMON   IV. 

assister  at  the  grave  of  his  own  better  hopes 
and  holier  desires,  of  all  in  which  the  true  life 
of  his  soul  consisted,  which  is  all  dead  and 
buried,  though  he,  a  sad  sur^-ivor  of  himself,  stil". 
cumbers  the  world  for  a  while. 

And  then  the  inward  separation  becomes  an 
outward  as  well ;  the  withered  branch  is  taken 
away.  It  does  not  retain  even  in  appearance  its 
connection  with  the  vine.  A  slightest  touch  will 
cause  it  to  fall  off,  for  there  is  no  vital  cohe- 
rence, but  only  external  contact,  between  it  and 
the  living  stem.  The  lightest  occasion,  the  most 
trivial  temptation,  will  be  sufficient  to  bring  out 
the  fact  that  the  man  has  already  inwardly  fallen 
away  from  his  Lord,  that  all  vital  union  between 
them  has  ceased. 

And  last  of  all,  the  withered  branches  are 
gathered  into  bundles  and  burned.  No  wood  so 
unfit  as  the  vine  for  any  work  but  its  own ;  as 
the  prophet  Ezekiel  significantly  taught.  If  not 
fit  for  its  own  work,  it  is  fit  for  nothing.  And 
therefore  "  they  arc  burned."  Let  us  leave  this 
doom    in    the  fearful    mystery  in   which    God's 


CHRIST   THE   TRUE    VINE.  105 

word  has  shrouded  it.  SuflScient  to  remember, 
and  there  may  be  a  fearful  analogy  to  this  in  the 
spiritual  world,  that  we  do  not  make  fuel  of 
wood  than  can  be  turned  to  any  nobler  uses  and 
ends  ;  but  that  we  do  so  without  remorse  of  that 
from  which  all  these  better  uses  have  for  ever 
passed  away. 

But,  my  brethren,  how  shall  we  gather  up  iu 
brief  for  ourselves  the  teaching  which  this  Scrip 
ture  contains.  Leaving  many  secondary  lessons, 
we  will  endeavor  to  draw  its  central  lesson  from 
it,  to  urge  this,  and  to  ask  you  to  carry  this 
away  with  you.  Christ  is  the  Vine,  ye  are  the 
branches.  It  is  not  that  you  may  he  branches ; 
but  you  are  branches,  in  virtue  of  your  Christian 
profession,  and  that  great  sacramental  act  iu 
which  you  were  sealed  to  Christ,  and  engrafted 
upon  him.  You  are  branches ;  but  branches 
dead,  or  branches  alive — branches  barren,  or 
branches  fruit-bearing  —  branches  which  he  will 
prune,  or  branches  which  he  will  take  away  — 
that  is  another  question ;  and  it  is  a  question 
which  you  must   decide.     There  are  two  roots 


106  SERMON   IV. 

out  of  which  you  may  grow,  from  which  you  may 
derive  your  life,  the  root  of  Adam,  and  the  root 
of  Christ.  The  first,  the  root  of  Adam,  is  a  bit- 
ter root,  a  corrupt  root,  and  can  only  impart  to 
you  of  its  own  bitterness  and  corruption.  The 
other,  a  new  root,  though  indeed  the  oldest  of 
all,  is  a  sweet  root,  and  you  may  draw  from  it 
of  the  sweetness  it  contains.  It  has  indeed  been 
profoundly  said,  that  the  whole  spiritual  history 
of  the  world,  and  of  every  man  in  the  world,  re- 
volves round  two  men,  Adam  and  Christ,  fitly 
therefore  called  the  first  Adam  and  the  second ; 
these  being,  so  to  speak,  the  two  poles  of  hu- 
manity, the  one  a  fountain  of  death  to  all,  and 
the  other  a  fountain  of  life,  overcoming  that 
death,  to  as  many  as  will  receive  life  of  him. 
So  indeed  is  it ;  and  the  great  question  for  every 
one  of  us  is  this,  To  which  of  these  will  we  be- 
long ?  with  which  cast  in  our  lot  ?  from  which 
draw  the  life  which  we  live  in  this  world,  the 
words  we  speak,  the  thoughts  we  think,  the 
deeds  we  do  ?  To  the  first,  to  the  old  Adam, 
we  must  belong  by  natural  birth  and  generation  ; 


CHRIST   THE   TRUE    VINE.  107 

to  the  second  wc  can  only  belong  by  grace,  by  a 
free  act  of  God's  will,  by  the  divine  regenera- 
tion, by  a  birth  from  above,  called  in  Scripture 
by  many  and  wonderful  names  —  a  new  creation, 
a  becoming  as  little  children,  a  passing  from 
death  to  life,  a  being  translated  out  of  the  king- 
dom of  darkness  into  the  kingdom  of  God's  dear 
Son — and  which,  availing  ourselves  of  the  im- 
agery supplied  by  the  subject  before  us,  we  might 
fitly  call,  a  being  broken  off  from  the  root  of  the 
old  Adam,  and  a  being  effectually  grafted  in 
upon  the  new.  I  say  effectually;  for  the  first 
initial  act  of  this  engrafting,  though  all-impor- 
tant, though  the  germ,  if  duly  unfolded,  of  every- 
thing which  follows,  may  yet  come  to  nothing. 
There  are  regenerate  (I  use  the  word  in  the 
sense  of  the  Prayer-Book  and  of  the  ancient 
Church),  who  yet  are  never  truly  reneived;  who 
stop  short  at  this  first  act,  an  act  which  might  have 
unfolded  itself  into  the  whole  Christian  life,  but 
which  does  not  so  in  them.  There  are  branches 
in  Christ  which  yet  may  cease  to  be  such ;  and 
l)eing  dead,  must  be  taken  away,  and  gathered 


108  SERMON    IV. 

into  bundles,  and  burned.  See  then,  1  would 
say,  that  this  regeneration  which  is  once  and  for 
all,  unfold  and  complete  itself  in  a  renewal, 
which  must  be  day  by  day ;  see  that,  being 
branches  in  him,  ye  be  also  branches  which  he 
will  own,  which  draw  their  life  from  liim,  which 
he  may  prune  (for  which  is  there  that  needs  not 
this  ?)  which  he  may  prune  to  the  quick,  but 
which  he  shall  not  take  away ;  which  shall  bear 
fruit,  and  whose  fruit  shall  remain. 

And  if  it  be  asked  by  any,  How  shall  we  be 
such  ?  he  himself  gives  the  answer,  "  Abide  in 
me,  and  I  will  abide  iji  you."  Union  with 
Christ,  this  is  the  secret  of  all  fruitfulness. 
And  if  again  it  is  asked.  How  shall  we  abide  ? 
it  may  be  answered,  first,  by  believing  that  wo 
have  been  made  partakers  of  Christ ;  and  then 
by  continual  acts  of  faith  on  him ;  falling  back 
evermore  upon  him ;  hiding  ourselves  from  the 
stress  of  temptation,  from  the  storm  of  trial  in 
the  secret  of  his  pavilion — the  life  we  live  in 
the  flesh  living  it  by  faith  in  the  Son  of  God — 
whatsoever  we  do,  doing  it  in  the  name  and  in 


CHRIST   THE   TRUE    VINE.  109 

the  spirit  of  the  Lord  Jesus.  We  abide  in  him 
by  acts  of  constant  and  earnest  prayer,  by  the 
study  and  devout  meditation  of  his  holy  Word, 
by  meeting  him  often  in  the  communion  of  his 
Holy  Sacrament ;  even  as,  in  respect  of  this  last 
means  of  abiding,  it  is  very  noticeable  that  these 
words  about  the  Vine  and  vine  branches,  this 
"  Abide  in  me,  and  I  in  you,  follows  immediate- 
ly in  time  on  the  institution  of  the  Sacrament 
of  union,  the  festival  of  Christ's  blessed  body 
and  blood.  And  so  shall  he  abide  in  you ;  and 
you,  who  without  him  can  do  nothing,  with  him 
shall  be  en  allied  to  do  all  things  ;  you  shall  bear 
much  fruit ;  and  that,  not  such  fruit  as  some 
bear  now,  grapes  of  gall  to  set  their  own  teeth 
on  edge  in  the  end,  apples  of  Sodom,  which  how- 
ever fair  to  look  on  at  the  first,  shall  one  day 
fill  their  own  mouths  with  ashes  and  with  dust. 
Oh,  brethren,  we  have  surely  something  better, 
something  wiser  to  do  with  our  lives  than  that 
which  so  many  do  with  theirs,  who  spend  the 
first  half  of  those  lives  in  making  the  other  half 
miserable,  in  bringing  to  a  baleful  ripeness  the 


110  SERMON   IV. 

bitter  fruit,  which  they  must  themselves  here- 
after eat  in  sorrow  and  confusion,  and  perhaps 
in  despair. 

And  if  when  we  imdte  you  to  this,  the  past 
discourages  you,  past  negligences,  past  sins,  past 
barrenness,  so  that  you  have  now  well  nigh  no 
heart  to  undertake  the  work  set  before  you,  that 
past,  I  would  say,  may  indeed  humble,  l)ut  I  do 
not  think  it  need  discourage  you.  You  remem- 
ber, perhaps,  the  comfort  with  which  the  great 
Athenian  orator  and  patriot  sought  to  strength- 
en and  encourage  the  spirits  of  his  countrymen  in 
their  final  struggle  with  Philip.  "  If,"  he  used  to 
say,  "  we  had  done  all  that  we  might,  if  we  had 
been  watchful  as  we  should  have  been,  if  we  had 
put  forth  our  strength  wisely  and  well,  and  yet 
were  in  such  evil  condition  as  we  are,  we  might 
then  with  good  reason  despair.  But  seeing  we 
must  own  that  we  have  not  done  so,  that  all  tliis 
has  conjc  upon  us  because  we  have  been  careless, 
self-indulgent,  wanting  providence  to  foresee  a 
danger,  and  promptness  to  meet  it,  there  is  a 
good  hope  that  if  we  take  another  course,  our 


CHRIST   THE   TRUE    VINE.  Ill 

aflfairs  vdW  take  another  course  as  well."  Exact- 
ly so  is  it,  brethren,  with  some  of  us.  If  we  had 
prayed  earnestly,  and  yet  no  more  had  come  of 
i  t  than  has  come ;  if  we  had  striven  manfully 
against  sin,  and  yet  sin  had  obtained  so  gi'eat  a 
dominion  over  us  as  it  has  ;  if  we  had  faithfully 
fulfilled  the  conditions  of  our  baptismal  covenant, 
and  yet,  notwithstanding,  had  so  often  and  so 
gi'ievously  fallen  ;  if  we  had  sought  to  abide  in 
Christ,  and  yet  had  remained  barren  and  unfruit- 
ful as,  alas !  we  are,  we  might  then  indeed  justly 
despair  ;  might  let  our  hands  hang  down,  and 
the  stream  of  our  corruptions  bear  us  whither  it 
would ;  we  might  drift  to  our  ruin  without  one 
effort  or  one  struggle  more. 

But  it  has  not  been  so.  Things  have  gone 
backward  with  you,  because  you  have  been  at 
no  pains  that  they  should  do  anything  else ; 
because,  without  a  miracle,  such  a  miracle  as 
vou  have  no  right  to  expect,  they  could  not  have 
done  otherwise  ;  because  there  have  been  a  thou- 
sand wastes  to  your  baptismal  grace  and  no  re- 
plenishings  ;  much  outgoing,  and  little  or  notb- 


112  SERMON   IV. 

ing  incoming;  because  you  have  prayed  little 
and  coldly  and  formally,  or  it  may  be,  have  not 
prayed  at  all ;  because  you  have  nourished  no 
secret  life  with  God  in  the  reading  and  medita- 
tion of  his  Word  ;  have  forsaken  liis  holy  Table, 
or,  if  you  have  drawn  nigh  to  it,  have  so  come 
that  you  would  far  better  have  stayed  away 
than  have  thus  presented  yourselves  there  ;  be- 
cause, it  may  be,  by  open  acts  of  sin,  of  unclean- 
ness  or  other  excess,  you  have  inflicted  deep 
gashes  upon  your  souls,  and  let  out  their  spiritual 
life-blood,  not  now  in  drops  but  in  streams.  I 
say  then  that  in  looking  back  upon  all  this,  if 
this  is  the  retrospect,  there  is  matter  for  infinite 
humiliation,  but  not  for  inert  and  inactive  de- 
spair. Such  a  life  could  have  had  no  other 
issues  than  it  /i/is  had.  But  claim,  wliich  is  your 
right,  to  live  in  God,  to  live  in  Christ,  to  draw 
life  from  him ;  claim  all  which  he  freely  gave 
you  when  he  said,  "  I  am  the  Vine,  ye  are  the 
branches ;"  and,  whatever  the  past  has  been, 
for  the  time  to  come  you  may  yet  have  "your 
fruit  unto  holiness,  and  the  end  everlasting  life." 


SERMON    V. 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN. 


SERMON   V. 

unbent  Suntian. 

CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN. 

John  v.  26,  27. 

For  as  the  Father  hath  life  in  himself,  so  hath  he  given  to 
the  Son  to  have  life  in  himself;  and  hath  given  him  authority 
to  execute  judgment  also,  because  he  is  the  Son  of  Man. 

It  is  not  surely  hj  accident,  it  is  not  without 
its  meaning,  that  our  Christian  year  begins  at  a 
different  moment  from  our  natural.  There  is 
still  a  full  month  to  run,  before  another  secular 
year  commences ;  the  new  Christian  year  has 
commenced  already.  We  are  thus  impressively 
taught  that  there  are  two  orders  in  this  world  ; 
an  order  of  nature,  and  in  the  midst  of  this,  and 
owning  other  laws  than  this  does,  an  order  of 


116  SERMON   V. 

grace.  With  Advent  Sunday,  as  a  glance  at 
our  Prayer-Book  is  itself  sufficient  to  indicate, 
our  Church  year,  as  distinguished  from  our  natu- 
ral, begins.  We  enter  this  day  upon  a  period 
which  the  Church  has  specially  dedicated  to  the 
contemplation  of  the  coming  of  our  Lord  and 
Saviour — in  which  she  would  have  us  devoutly 
carry  back  our  thoughts  to  his  fii'st  coming  in 
great  humility,  to  the  cradle  of  Bethlehem,  with 
a  few  poor  shepherds  round  it ;  in  which  She 
would  have  us  carry  on  our  thoughts  to  his  com- 
ing again  in  his  majesty,  to  the  throne  of  his 
glory,  with  thousands  and  ten  thousands  of  an- 
gels waiting  to  fulfil  his  commands. 

Following  then  these  plain  leadings  of  our 
Church,  I  propose  a  little  to  occupy  your  atten- 
tion to-day  with  the  second  of  these  stupendous 
events,  with  that  yet  in  the  womb  of  time,  that 
day  as  yet  miborn,  but  ever  hastening  to  its 
birth,  which  shall  be,  as  Christ  and  his  Apos- 
tles ever  taught,  the  great  consummation  of  all 
things,  the  winding  up  of  the  present  age,  the 
clearing  of  all  the  ways  of  God,  the  complete  re- 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN.     117 

demption  of  his  servants,  the  final  destruction  of 
his  foes. 

And  yet  I  can  not  conceal  from  myself  the 
difficulty,  I  may  say  the  danger,  of  my  subject. 
We  have  so  often  talked  and  heard  talk  about  a 
judgment-day,  and  this  with  so  little  of  earnest 
addressing  ourselves  to  the  tasks  which  such  a 
day,  rightly  believed,  would  impose  upon  us,  that 
in  just  punishment  of  these  hollow  unreal  words 
of  ours  we  have  come,  I  will  not  say  to  disbe- 
lieve in  such  a  day,  but  so  to  believe  in  it  that  it 
exercises  the  very  slightest  influence  on  our  lives. 
The  glorious  retributions  of  that  day  do  not  rouse 
us  to  a  more  active  well-doing.  The  dreadful 
terrors  of  that  day  do  not  drive  us  to  that  one 
hope  of  sinners,  the  Cross  of  Christ.  And  this 
most  tremendous  reality,  when  it  moves  us  at  all, 
it  is  rather  in  the  region  of  our  imagination  than 
in  that  of  our  affections  or  our  conscience.  Thus, 
who  will  not  own  that  he  has  admired  the  mighty 
creations  of  the  painter's  or  poet's  skill,  as  they 
have  sought  to  portray  that  judgment-scene, 
Christ  upon  his  throne,  the  elect  and  the  repro- 


118  SERMON    V, 

bate  gathered  before  him — that  he  has  too  often 
done  this,  without  one  thought  passing  through 
his  mind,  "  I  shall  be  there,  I  shall  be  one  of 
that  multitude  whom  these  by  their  art  have 
summoned  before  that  throne ;  I  shall  be  stand- 
ing, not  as  a  spectator,  but  myself  to  receive  my 
doom,  to  be  acknowledged  or  rejected,  to  be  set 
on  the  right  hand  of  that  throne,  or  on  the  left ;" 
—  while  the  still  more  direct  and  authoritative 
statements  of  Scripture  have  hardly  a  more 
effectual  working  on  our  hearts  or  our  lives.  I 
feel  this  danger,  the  danger  that  I  may  increase 
this  dullness  and  deadness  of  spirit  in  myself 
and  in  you,  even  in  the  very  act  of  warning  and 
protesting  against  it,  and  attempting  to  dispel 
it.  Yet  still  in  the  earnest  triist  that  of  God's 
grace  this  may  not  be  so,  I  will  not  decline  the 
subject ;  but  as  I  have  in  each  preceding  dis- 
course taken  for  my  argument  some  office  or  dig- 
nity of  our  Lord,  I  shall  not  now  depart  from  my 
rule,  but,  as  this  day  suggests,  consider  the  glo- 
rious Advent  of  our  Lord  and  Saviour,  or  Christ 
the  Judge  of  all  men  —  at  the  same  time  not 


CHRIST   THE   JUDGE   OP   ALL   MEN.  119 

leaving  out,  as  the  Scripture  never  leaves  out, 
the  Judge  who  is  the  Saviour  as  well,  the  King 
who  is  also  the  Brother,  and  indeed  because  a 
Brother  therefore  a  King. 

For  you  will  not  have  failed,  I  think,  my 
Christian  brethren,  often  to  note  the  remarkable 
language  of  my  text.  In  it  our  Lord  declares 
that  all  judgment  has  been  committed  to  him, 
that  he  has  received  authority  to  execute  judg- 
ment, because  he  is  the  Son  of  Man.  At  first 
one  might  have  expected  something  quite  differ- 
ent ;  one  might  have  expected  him  to  say,  that 
all  judgment  was  committed  to  him,  because  he 
is  the  Son  of  God,  for  power  belongeth  unto 
God.  But  it  is  not  so  ;  judgment  is  his,  because 
he  is  the  Son  of  Man.  Therefore  is  it,  because 
he  is  himself  man  and  the  Son  of  Man  that  he 
exercises  this  supreme  authority  among  the  chil- 
dren of  men.  There  is  a  memorable  prevision 
of  this  in  the  law  of  Moses,  where  God,  antici- 
pating the  future  historical  development  of  his 
people,  and  that  a  time  would  arrive  when  they 
should  ask  a  king,  gives  certain  rules  and  con- 


li,?  SERMON    V.    . 

ditions  under  which  tlicy  shall  proceed  to  his 
election,  and  this  among  others :  "  One  fron 
among  thy  brethren  shoH  thou  set  a  king  ov.jr 
ttce :  th^u  mayest  not  set  a  stranger  over  thee, 
'.hit  is  not  thy  brother."  The  law  which  God 
thus  imposed  upon  his  people,  he  observed  him- 
self. He  set  no  stranger  over  the  children  of 
men,  that  was  not  their  brother ;  but  one  chosen 
from  among  his  brethren  was  judge  and  king, 
and  is  so  for  evermore. 

Most  blessed,  most  comfortable  thought  for 
those  that  in  the  midst  of  many  weaknesses, 
many  infirmities,  of  temptations  often  but  not  al- 
ways resisted,  are  seeking  with  sincerity  of  pur- 
pose to  do  his  will,  to  walk  in  his  truth.  He 
was  himself  taken  from  among  men ;  he  knoweth 
whereof  they  are  made ;  he  can  have  compassion 
on  their  infirmities,  having  been  himself  in  all 
points  tempted  like  unto  them ;  he  will  temper 
judgment  with  mercy ;  mercy  shall  rejoice  against 
judgment.  But  dreadful  thought  for  the  faith- 
less and  false-hearted,  that  God  shall  thus  judge 
the  world  by  the  Man  whom  he  has  ordained ; 


CHRIST   THE   JUDGE   OF    ALL    MEN.  121 

mfinite  aggravation  of  their  guilt,  and  therefore 
of  their  doom.  A  divine  love  men  might  profess 
themselves  unable  to  understand,  unable  to  meet 
with  a  corresponding  love  of  their  own.  They 
might  plead  that  it  was  something  too  remote, 
something  lifted  too  high  above  the  range  of 
their  sympathies  and  affections.  But  how  plead 
this  against  a  humun  love — against  his  love  who 
sought  to  draw  men  to  himself,  and  so  to  his 
Father,  with  cords  of  a  man?  Oh,  what  guilt 
to  have  stood  out  against  this !  It  will  be  that 
thorn-wounded  brow,  of  which  the  frown  will  be 
so  terrible ;  those  nail-pierced  hands  that  shall 
fall  with  such  a  crushing  weight  upon  the  sinner. 
It  will  be  in  looking  at  him  who  was  pierced  for 
them,  and  whom  they  pierced,  that  the  tribes  of 
the  earth  shall  wail. 

This  then  is  a  first  consideration  which  may 
well  rouse  us  from  a  cold  and  heartless  contem- 
plation of  that  great  day  —  this,  namely,  that 
the  Judge  will  be  the  Son  of  Man,  who,  because 
he  is  such,  will  execute  judgment  among  men. 

But   in  respect  of  that  judgment  itself,  let  us 
G 


122  SERMON   V. 

seek  without  losing  ourselves  in  details,  to  seize 
two  or  three  of  its  grander  features,  and  so  to 
present  them  to  our  minds  that  they  may  serve 
to  quicken  and  strengthen  the  spiritual  life  of  our 
souls. 

And,  first,  let  us  keep  in  mind  that  while 
there  are  many  judgment-days  in  the  world's 
story,  that  day  is  the  complement  and  consum- 
mation of  them  all.  In  one  sense,  there  are 
many  judgment-days.  Every  day  is  such ;  for 
Christ  is  a  king  now,  a  judge  among  the  nations, 
putting  down  one  nation  and  setting  up  an- 
other; removing  the  candlestick  of  some  apos- 
tate Church ;  taking  away  the  kingdom  of  God 
from  these,  and  giving  it  to  others  that  shall 
bring  forth  the  fruits  thereof.  In  one  sense, 
there  are  many  judgment-days,  however  one  may 
crown  and  complete  them  all.  It  is  no';  for 
nothing  that  in  the  24th  of  St.  Matthew  the  de- 
struction of  Jerusalem  and  the  end  of  the  world 
so  run  into  one  another  that  it  is  almost  or  quite 
impossible  to  draw  the  line,  and  say  what  be- 
longs to  one,  and  what  to  the  other.     In  all  like- 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OP  ALL  MEN.     123 

lihood  it  never  was  intended  that  any  such  line 
should  be  drawn ;  for  that  day,  while  it  was  the 
rehearsal  of  a  day  yet  more  terrible,  was  itself 
a  day  of  doom,  even  as  there  have  been,  and 
probably  will  be  many  such,  before  the  day  of 
doom  shall  arrive.  We  walk  indeed  in  a  world 
of  judgments,  where  in  every  page  of  story  the 
footprints  of  the  divine  righteousness  may  be 
plainly  traced. 

And  as  it  is  with  nations  and  Churches,  so  also 
with  men  in  particular.  How  often  the  life  of  a 
man  is  the  judgment  of  that  man.  With  his 
own  hands  he  has  stricken  the  garlands  of  glad- 
ness from  his  brow,  and  if  he  walks  now  dis- 
crowned, it  is  because  he  has  discrowned  him- 
self; if  threads  of  darkness  and  gloom  are  woven 
into  the  inmost  tissue  of  his  life,  from  which  for 
this  life  at  least  they  shall  never  be  withdrawn, 
it  is  he  himself  that  has  woven  them  there. 
Oftentimes  this  is  so  plain  that  every  eye  can 
read  it ;  and  often,  when  it  is  not  plain  to 
others,  it  is  plain  to  the  man  himself.  He  who 
knows  the  secrets. of  his  own  heart  and  of  his 


124  SERMON   V. 

own  life,  knows  what  the  worm  is  that  has 
gnawed  at  the  root  of  his  earthly  felicity,  and 
caused  it  to  wither.  Like  an  eagle  pierced  with 
an  arrow  which  its  own  wing  had  fledged,  he  too, 
brought  down  from  his  pride  of  place,  can  only 
too  well  perceive  that  the  arrow  of  God's  judg- 
ments which  found  him  out,  was  fledged  and 
speeded  by  his  own  sin. 

Yet  while  thus  there  are  as  many  judgment- 
days  in  the  world's  story  as  there  are  days,  God 
showing  even  now  that  he  is  a  God  of  judgment, 
and  that  by  him  actions  are  weighed,  still  for  all 
this  how  imperfect,  how  incomplete  are  they  all. 
How  much  is  left  in  the  rough ;  how  much  need- 
ing to  be  adjusted  and  set  on  the  square ;  how 
much  is  evidently  postponed,  waiting  the  redress 
of  a  mightier  day.  The  wicked  prosper,  the 
righteous  are  trodden  under  foot.  Dives  feasts 
to  the  end,  and  Lazarus  pines  to  the  end.  The 
.  present  is  oftentimes  what  St.  Paul  so  significant- 
ly calls  it,  "  man's  day" — man's,  at  least,  in 
part ;  for  God,  in  the  language  of  the  Psalmist, 
"is  strong  and  patient"  —  patient  because  he  is 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN.     125 

strong,  because  he  can  aflbrd  to  wait ;  because 
none  shall  through  the  delay  escape  from  his 
hands.  A  day,  however,  is  coming  which  shall 
not  be  man's  any  more ;  a  day  which  shall  be 
God's  day,  God's  altogether,  which  he  shall  vin- 
dicate as  wholly  his  own ;  that  which  shall  dif- 
ference it  from  every  other  day  consisting  in  this, 
that  it  shall  be  the  final  and  complete  adjusting 
of  God's  accounts  with  the  world,  and  with  every 
man  in  the  world ;  the  day  which  will  not  leave, 
as  every  other  day  has  left,  its  long  arrears  be- 
hind it ;  but  that  wherein  every  sin  wliich  has  not 
been  freely  forgiven  through  Christ  the  Saviour, 
must  be  duly  punished  by  Christ  the  Judge. 

Let  us  not,  my  brethren,  lose  sight  of  this :  as 
little  indeed  of  one  as  of  the  other  side  of  this 
solemn  truth.  Do  not  let  us  in  thought  of  a 
future  judgment,  lose  sight  of  a  present ;  do  not 
let  us  in  view  of  a  present,  explain  away  a  great- 
er which  is  in  store.  We  can  not  afford  to  let 
either,  or  our  faith  in  either,  go.  A  day  of  judg- 
ment far  off,  with  nothing  in  hand,  no  present 
pledges  of  God's  zeal  for  righteousness,  no  first- 


126  SERMON   V. 

fruits  of  judgment,  would  soon  be  for  men  little 
better  than  a  shadow  or  a  dream ;  and  that, 
"Tush,  doth  God  see?"  "the  Lord  hath  for- 
saken the  earth ;"  "  every  one  that  doeth  evil  is 
precious  in  his  sight,"  would  soon  be  the  utter- 
ance not  merely  of  a  few  eminently  ungodly,  but 
the  shuddering  apprehension  of  all.  While  on 
the  other  hand  to  suppose  that  all  was  being 
judged  now,  that  there  was  no  huge  catastrophe 
in  store,  no  divine  crisis  in  the  world's  story, 
larger,  mightier,  more  searching,  more  satisfy- 
ing than  any  that  hitherto  has  been,  redressing 
all  which  is  now  unredressed,  rewarding  all  that 
is  now  unrewarded,  punishing,  where  this  shall 
need,  all  that  is  unpunished  now — this  were 
enough  to  drive  a  righteous  man,  as  he  looks  out 
on  the  present  face  of  the  earth,  and  the  oppres- 
sions done  under  the  sun,  to  despair.  Be  it  ours 
to  keep,  by  God's  grace,  a  fast  hold  on  both 
these  truths,  and  to  believe  in  our  God  as  one 
who  both  now  is  judging,  and  hereafter  will 
judge,  the  world  in  righteousness  by  the  Man 
whom  he  has  ordained. 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN.     127 

But,  secondly,  it  follows  from  the  final  char- 
acter of  that  day,  and  constitutes  another  char- 
acteristic feature  of  it,  that  it  shall  be  one  in 
which  God  shall  judge  the  secrets  of  men's 
hearts  by  Jesus  Christ.  "  We  must  all  appear^'' 
or,  as  now  it  is  generally  admitted,  the  words 
with  a  slight  variation  should  be  rendered,  "  we 
must  all  he  manifested  before  the  judgment-seat 
of  Christ"  —  a  far  more  searching  thought.  If 
we  were  to  employ  a  homely  expression  and  say, 
"  turned  inside  out,"  it  would,  I  believe,  exactly 
express  the  intention  of  St.  Paul ;  all  that  is  in- 
ward now,  and  thus  hidden,  becoming  outward 
then ;  all  secret  thing-s  searched  out ;  every 
mask  stripped  off ;  every  disguise  torn  away ; 
whatever  any  man's  work  has  been,  that  day  de- 
claring it ;  and  not  according  to  its  outward 
varnish,  but  its  inward  substance  ;  for  it  shall  be 
eminently  a  day  of  revelation^  of  unveiling,  that 
is,  or  drawing  back  the  veil  which  now  covers 
and  conceals  so  much.  It  shall  be  a  day  of  reve- 
lation, and  this  in  respect  of  the  hidden  things 
both  of  glory  and  of  shame. 


128  SERMON    V. 

It  shall  be  a  day  of  revelation  for  the  hidden 
things  of  glory.  We  may  bless  God  that  there 
shall  be  many  such,  which  shall  be  first  unveiled 
upon  that  day,  the  deeds  of  light,  which  yet 
shunned  the  light  as  carefully  as  ever  the  deeds 
of  darkness  have  done ;  the  alms  which  the  right 
hand  did,  and  the  left  hand  never  knew ;  the  acts 
of  self-denial  unguessed  of  by  all  save  the  doer ; 
the  painful  victories  over  self,  won  in  the  unseen 
battle-field  of  the  heart ;  the  prayer  of  many  a 
Nathanael  under  the  fig-tree ;  the  wrestling  of 
many  a  Jacob  with  God  as  with  an  adversary 
through  the  long  night  of  some  strong  tempta- 
tion ;  all  these  shall  come  forth,  that  he  who 
saw  in  secret  may  reward  them  openly.  Nor 
will  that  be  only  a  day  when  God's  hidden  ones 
shall  first  be  revealed  to  others.  Many  a  faith- 
ful man  shall  then  first  be  revealed  to  himself, 
shall  wonder  to  find  that  of  the  good  whereof  he 
thought  so  little,  God  has  thought  so  much ;  and 
shall  hardly  understand  that  for  this  very  reason, 
namely,  that  he  esteemed  of  it  so  humbly,  that  he 
forgot  it,  therefore  God  has  written  it  in  his  book. 


CHRIST   THK    JUDGK    OP    ALL    MEN.  129 

But  seeing,  brethren,  that  there  is  nothing 
hidden  which  shall  not  be  known,  nor  covered 
which  shall  not  be  revealed,  that  day  shall  be 
the  day  of  a  sadder  revelation,  that  namely  of 
the  unfruitful  works  of  darkness,  of  the  hidden 
things  of  shame ;  and  all  which  the  sinner  would 
hardly  have  borne  should  be  known  to  one  fel- 
low-man and  fellow-sinner,  which  he  would  have 
counted  no  darkness  nor  shadow  of  death  thick 
enough  to  hide  now,  he  must  then  avouch  in  the 
face  of  an  assembled  world,  before  the  holy  an- 
gels, and  God  the  Judge  of  all.  No  wonder 
that  we  read  of  some  that  on  that  day  shall  rise 
"  to  shame  and  everlasting  contempt ;"  that 
shall  cry  to  the  hills  to  cover  them,  and  the 
mountains  to  fall  on  them :  who  would  welcome 
even  this  destruction  rather  than  the  scorn  and 
confusion  which  shall  then  be  their  portion.  No 
wonder  that  the  Psalmist,  looking  onward  to 
such  a  day,  should  have  exclaimed,  "  Blessed  is 
the  man  whose  sin  is  covered,  whose  unrighteous- 
ness is  forgiven."  What  man  is  there  among  us, 
wli/^  would  not  fain  make  his  own  the  blessed- 


I  no  SERMON    V. 

ness  of  the  man  whose  iniquity  on  that  day  shall 
be  sought  and  not  be  found ;  for  he,  the  same 
who  makes  inquisition  for  it,  shall  himself  have 
already  borne,  and  borne  it  away,  and  abolished 
it  for  ever.  And  here  too  it  shall  not  be  only 
what  men  have  hitherto  concealed  from  others 
which  shall  then  be  laid  bare.  Many  a  sinner 
shall  then  first  be  revealed  to  himself.  The  long 
self-delusion  of  a  life,  the  flattering  of  himself  in 
his  own  eyes,  the  counting  all  his  ways  pure,  all 
this  shall  only  then  have  end.  Surely  if  this  is 
possible,  that  a  man  may  hide  himself  not  merely 
from  others,  but  from  his  own  self,  our  prayer  to 
God  should  be,  "  Show  me  myself  betimes ;  let 
me  not  first  discover  my  sin,  ray  guilt,  my  mis- 
ery, when  it  is  too  late  to  part  from  them,  when 
there  is  no  more  sacrifice  for  sin,  when  these 
must  cling  and  cleave  to  me,  and  be  a  portion  of 
myself,  for  ever." 

But  then,  when  all  are  thus  made  manifest  to 
themselves  and  to  others,  then  shall  the  King 
divide  between  them ;  and  to  use  his  own  sim- 
plest but  sublimest  words,  "  separate  them  one 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OP  ALL  MEN.     131 

from  another,  as  a  shepherd  divideth  his  sheep 
from  the  goats;"  —  then,  and  not  till  then;  for 
every  mouth  must  be  stopped,  and  the  righteous- 
ness of  his  judgment  must  be  apparent  to  all. 
Consider  a  little  what  this  separation  of  the  pre- 
cious from  the  vile  must  be.  Here  in  the  pres- 
-ent  time  light  alternates  with  darkness,  good 
men  are  mingled  with  bad  ;  streaks  of  light  par- 
tially illumine  even  the  darkness  itself;  evil  men, 
even  though  evil  be  the  predominant  law  of  their 
lives,  are  not  all  evil.  But  there  all  good  will 
be  gathered  by  a  natural  affinity  to  him  from 
whom  its  goodness  first  descended :  all  evil  must 
own  what  it  is  so  slow  to  acknowledge  now,  an 
Evil  One  as  the  father  from  whom  originally  it 
came.  There  are  many  companies  now,  grouped 
according  to  the  transient  laws  and  necessities  of 
this  present  time  ;  there  shall  be  only  tioo  com- 
panies then.  In  one  shall  be  all  the  excellent 
of  the  earth,  all  that  have  kept  the  faith,  that 
have  overcome  the  world,  that  have  made  their 
garments  white  betimes  in  the  blood  of  the 
Tiamb  ;  saints  and  martyrs  that  stand  forth  to  us 


182  SERMON   V. 

as  the  pillar  fires  of  that  heavenly  City  toward 
which  we  travel ;  and  with  these  thousands  and 
ten  thousands  of  whom  the  world  keeps  no  mem- 
ory, whose  names,  not  written  here,  shall  yet  be 
found  written  in  heaven  in  the  Lamb's  book  of 
life.  Nor  those  only  of  other  times,  unknown  to 
us  in  the  flesh,  or  heard  of  only  by  the  hearing 
of  the  ear ;  but  some  also  for  whom  we  ourselves 
have  thanked  God  that  such  have  been,  and  that 
our  lives  were  blended  with  theirs ;  being,  as 
they  are  to  us,  the  pledge  of  an  eternal  life  be- 
yond the  grave  worth  all  the  arguments  of  the 
schools,  for  we  are  sure  that  such  love,  such 
goodness,  could  never  have  been  kindled  in  hur 
man  souls,  again  after  a  little  moment  to  be  ex- 
tinguished for  ever.  To  these  the  King  shall 
say,  "  Come ;  you  loved,  weakly  and  imperfect- 
ly, yet  still  you  loved  him  who  had  first  loved 
you,  and  now  the  kingdom  of  love  opens  its  arms 
to  receive  you." 

But  that  other  company,  the  dregs  and  dross 
of  the  world,  the  refuse  and  ofiscouring,  all  tne 
darkness,  the  pride,  the  falsehood,  the   selfish- 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE   OF   ALL   MEN.  133 

ness,  the  lust,  the  ciTielty,  the  hate,  all  which, 
isolated  and  scattered,  sliows  so  hideous  now, 
all  this  gathered  into  one,  unchecked  ))y  the 
presence  of  any  good,  fiercer  and  stronger  be- 
cause then  finding  no  vent,  but  all  turned  in 
upon  itself,  who  can  dare  to  dwell  even  in 
thought  upon  this  ?  They  shall  be  judged  al- 
ready ;  the  being  what  they  arc  shall  be  itself 
their  judgment;  which  judgment  shall  yet  em- 
body itself  outwardly  in  that  "  Depart  from  Me" 
of  the  King  ;  "  Depart  from  me  ;  ye  have  chosen 
to  abide  at  a  distance  from  me,  and  now  take  for 
ever  that  which  ye  have  chosen.  My  love  to- 
ward you  awoke  no  answering  love  on  your 
parts  toward  me,  nor  toward  my  brethren  and 
yours ;  and  now  the  kingdom  of  love  rejects  you, 
as  ye  have  rejected  it.  Be  filled  with  your  own 
doings ;  be  gathered  under  your  own  head ;  un- 
der the  banner  of  him  who  is  the  prince  of  lust 
and  selfishness  and  pride  ;  as  I  am  the  Prince  of 
purity,  of  humility,  and  love,  and  would  fain 
have  gathered  you  under  mine." 

^et  think  not,  brethren,  when  we  thus  speak, 


134  SERMON   V. 

when,  as  Scripture  has  done  before  us,  we  divide 
these  solemn  and  dread  utterances  of  Christ  into 
a  '•  Come"  and  a  "  Depart,"  that  these  are  there- 
fore two  diiferent  revelations  of  God.  They  are 
at  the  root  one  and  the  same,  working  differently 
according  to  the  different  quality  of  that  on 
which  they  work.  When  we  say,  "  Our  God  is 
Love,"  and  when  we  say,  "  Our  God  is  a  con- 
suming fire,"  we  do  but  say  the  same  thing  over 
again,  looking  at  it  from  opposite  sides.  For 
just  as  the  same  heat  hardens  the  clay  and 
softens  the  wax,  affects  each,  that  is,  according 
to  its  own  nature  ;  or  as  the  same  light  gladdens 
a  sound  eye,  but  torments  a  diseased;  as  the 
same  pillar  of  a  cloud  was  a  cloud  and  darkness 
to  the  Egyptians,  but  gave  light  to  the  children 
of  Israel,  guided  these,  and  troubled  those ;  so 
the  same  supreme  moral  energy  of  God  which  is 
at  once  intensest  love  of  good,  and  intensest  ha- 
tred of  evil,  drawing  to  itself  whatever  is  akin, 
repelling  from  itself  whatever  is  alien,  to  it,  shall 
work  the  joy  and  blessedness  of  all  that  through 
the  regeneration  have  in  the  ground  of  their  be- 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OF  ALL  MEN.     136 

ing  become  like-minded  with  liim,  being  lovers 
of  good  ;  the  tribnlation  and  anguish  of  all  that 
arc  contrary-minded,  and  whom  the  dreadful 
presence  of  that  good,  from  which  they  shall 
now  be  able  to  hide  themselves  no  longer,  shall 
at  once  condemn  and  torment.  The  revelation 
of  the  righteous  God,  of  the  incarnate  Son  of 
God,  contains  in  itself  all  which  the  ungodly  can 
fear,  or  the  faithful  can  desire. 

Let  us,  I  beseech  you,  try  ourselves  each  one, 
and  estimate  our  own  standing  and  condition  in 
that  kingdom  which  he  shall  set  up,  in  the  light 
of  this  awful  fact.  Christ  shall  set  up  a  kingdom 
of  truth :  hast  thou  loved  the  truth,  or  hast  thou 
rather  been  loving  and  making  a  lie  ?  He  shall 
set  up  a  kingdom  of  purity :  hast  thou  been  seek- 
ing to  cleanse  thyself  from  all  filthiness  of  flesh 
and  spirit?  or  by  sensual  thought  and  sensual 
act  polluting  both? — of  love;  but  hast  thou 
been  selfish  and  hard-hearted  ?  of  humility ;  but 
hast  thou  been  proud  and  high-minded  ?  There 
shall  no  wise  enter  into  it  any  thing  that  defileth. 
Is  this  the  sentence  of  thine  exclusion  ? 


136  SERMON    V. 

What  questions,  my  brethren,  concern  us  at  all 
so  nearly  as  these  ?  to  be  with  God,  or  to  be 
without  him  for  ever,  it  is  this  which  that  day 
must  determine ;  or  rather  it  is  this  which  that 
day  must  declare  ;  we  are  ourselves  determining 
it  now;  that  day  will  only  declare  it.  There 
are  indeed  who  see  a  light  breaking  even  for 
them  whom  that  day  shall  enfold  in  its  dark- 
ness ;  and  far,  far  off,  the  faint  glimmering  of 
another  dawn  for  them  beyond  the  blackness  and 
darkness  which  shall  encompass  them  now.  I 
can  not  see  it  in  God's  Word,  but,  on  the  con- 
trary, very  much  which  excludes  it ;  which  pro- 
claims that  for  them  who  reject  the  Gospel  of 
his  grace,  there  remaineth,  when  once  their  day 
of  grace  has  ended,  no  other  sacrifice  for  sin 
than  that  which  they  have  wilfully  despised  and 
rejected ;  and  to  my  mind  our  life  would  lose 
much  of  its  solemn  earnestness,  its  awful  mean- 
ing, if  I  did  not  believe  that  within  those  brief 
limits  which  shut  it  in  on  either  side,  the  issues 
of  eternity  were  being  decided,  and  we  making 
our  choice,  that  choice  which  must  be  ours  for 


CHRIST  THE  JUDGE  OP  ALL  MEN.     137 

ever ;  clioosing  for  God,  or  choosing  against 
him ;  to  be  ever  with  Christ,  or  to  be  ever  sep- 
arated from  him ;  if  I  did  not  feel,  brethren, 
that  within  these  narrow  lists,  which  yet  are  not 
too  narrow  for  this  great  decision,  everything 
must  be  gained,  or  everything  be  lost. 


THE   END. 


